scholarly journals Speaking of God in Stand Your Ground Times

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Brown Douglas

Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas is Professor of Religion at Goucher College where she holds the Susan D. Morgan Professorship of Religion. She is widely published in national and international journals and other publications. As a leading voice in the development of a womanist theology, Essence magazine counts Douglas “among this country’s most distinguished religious thinkers, teachers, ministers, and counselors.”  Her groundbreaking and widely used book Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (1999) was the first to address the issue of homophobia within the black church community.  Dr. Douglas has been a pioneering and highly sought after voice in regard to addressing sexual issues in relation to the black religious community. She has been very active in advocating equal rights for LGBT persons.Her latest book, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015) examines the challenges of a “Stand Your Ground” culture for the Black Church and all black bodies.  Other books include The Black Christ (1994), What’s Faith Got to Do With It?:Black Bodies/Christian Souls (2005),and Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (2012). Dr. Douglas is also the co-editor of Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection (2010).Douglas is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Denison where she earned a bachelor of science summa cum laude in psychology.  She went on to earn a master of divinity and a doctoral degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary (New York City). Rev. Douglas was ordained at Ohio’s St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in 1985. She received the Anna Julia Cooper Award by the Union of Black Episcopalians (July 2012) for “her literary boldness and leadership in the development of a womanist theology and discussing the complexities of Christian faith in African-American contexts.”Rev. Douglas was an Associate Priest at Holy Comforter Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. for over 20 years.  She currently serves at the Washington National Cathedral.

Author(s):  
Jean E. Snyder

This chapter examines the family and community that shaped Harry T. Burleigh's youth. In the early 1860s, as the country moved toward civil war, a young Henry Thacker Burley (the family used the “Burley” spelling during his lifetime but eventually changed to the English spelling, “Burleigh”) settled in Erie and threw himself into the struggle against slavery and for equal rights. On September 17, 1862, Henry and Elizabeth Lovey Waters were married. On December 12, 1866, Henry (Harry) Thacker Burleigh was born. This chapter discusses how the strong music tradition at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Erie nourished Harry's lifelong commitment to church music in general and to the Episcopal Church in particular. It also considers Elizabeth's marriage to John Edgar Elmendorf after Henry. It shows that Burleigh's most profound influence in his formative years was his strong family, for whom education was a primary value. Through his public and business education in Erie, Harry T. Burleigh developed the skills and the confidence that facilitated his entry into New York City's broader public arena.


2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (5) ◽  
pp. 482-508
Author(s):  
Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon

Following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and so many others, recent protest in Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC, LA, Portland and a host of other locations, both, stateside and abroad are being framed in the public discourse as everything from radical resistance to public madness and everything in between. From the Black Lives Matter movement activist to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion advocates, one of the key components in, both, radical resistance strategies or public expressions of cultural madness, is a ground swelling of rage! But what is rage? How can we recognize it? Historically, what has been the consequences of Black rage? And in this unique, historical moment, what if anything can be done to leverage it? Mining August Wilson’s work for definitions, instances, and consequences of Black rage, this paper interrogates August Wilson’s narratives on rage as a way to talk about the historiography and commodifying of Black rage as a way of victimizing and disposing of Black bodies in America. In this way, we hope to offer suggestions in this historical moment on how to leverage Black rage, rather than to be snared by it.


1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Krasner

Although Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) belonged to the same generation of turn-of-the-century African American performers as did Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bert Williams, and George Walker, she had a rather different view of how best to represent her race and gender in the performing arts. Walker taught white society in New York City how to do the Cakewalk, a celebratory dance with links to West African festival dance. In Walker's choreography of it, it was reconfigured with some ingenuity to accommodate race, gender, and class identities in an era in which all three were in flux. Her strategy depended on being flexible, on being able to make the transition from one cultural milieu to another, and on adjusting to new patterns of thinking. Walker had to elaborate her choreography as hybrid, merging her interpretation of cakewalking with the preconceptions of a white culture that became captivated by its form. To complicate matters, Walker's choreography developed during a particularly unstable and volatile period. As Anna Julia Cooper remarked in 1892.


Author(s):  
Julie Miller

This book shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him. Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women's rights. Norman also attracted the support of politicians, journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to “seduction” and to advocate for the rights of workers. This book describes how New Yorkers followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained sympathys, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes. The book weaves together Norman's story to show how, in one violent moment, she expressed all the anger that the women of the emerging movement for women's rights would soon express in words.


Author(s):  
Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Each year the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, celebrates its annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola. The crowning event is the Dance of the Giglio, a devotional spectacle of strength and struggle in which men lift a four-ton, seventy-foot tower through the streets. This ethnographic study delves into this masculine world of devotion and the religious lives of lay Catholic men. It explores contemporary men’s devotion to the saints and the Catholic parish as an enduring venue for the pursuit of manhood and masculinity amid gentrification and neighborhood change in New York City. It explores the way laymen imagine themselves and their labor as high stakes, the very work of keeping their parish alive. In this Brooklyn church men, money, and devotion are intertwined. In the backstage spaces of the parish men enact their devotion through craft, manual labor, and fundraising. A rich exploration of embodiment and material religion, this book examines how men come to be part of religious community through material culture: costumes, clothing, objects, and tattoos. It argues that devotion is as much about skills, the body, and relationships between men as it is about belief.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Jacqueline H. Rider

Organized in 1887 by religious, financial, and social leaders in Manhattan, the Church Club of New York holds a library of some 1,500 volumes. It documents the religious roots and theological framework of New York’s financial elite, the birth of the Episcopal Church, and mainline American Protestantism’s reaction to the Social Gospel movement in the early 20th century. This essay discusses how titles illustrate the challenges these gentlemen confronted to their roles and their church’s identity in a rapidly changing society. Industrialization, modernization, immigration were all affecting their personal, professional, and spiritual lives.  It also reflects on how the collection as a whole mirrors the evolution of one sector of 20th century American culture.


1988 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield

One of the most boldly conceived assaults on benighted Africa during the nineteenth century was that undertaken by mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. With the brash confidence characteristic of the age, hundreds of American missionaries were dispatched from New York and Baltimore to convert the heathen tribes of Africa and wrest a continent from ruin. If the experience of the Protestant Episcopal church is at all typical, however, these efforts not infrequently aroused suspicion and open hostility. In fact, Episcopal penetration of Liberia in the second half of the second century was remarkable for a long and bitter contest with black nationalists who were intent on using the church as a vehicle for their own personal and racial ambitions.


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