Race, Religion, Region

Race, Religion, Region PDF

Author: Fay Botham

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0816550506

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Racial and religious groups have played a key role in shaping the American West, yet scholars have for the most part ignored how race and religion have influenced regional identity. In this collection, eleven contributors explore the intersections of race, religion, and region to show how they transformed the West. From the Punjabi Mexican Americans of California to the European American shamans of Arizona to the Mexican Chinese of the borderlands, historical meanings of race in the American West are complex and are further complicated by religious identities. This book moves beyond familiar stereotypes to achieve a more nuanced understanding of race while also showing how ethnicity formed in conjunction with religious and regional identity. The chapters demonstrate how religion shaped cultural encounters, contributed to the construction of racial identities, and served as a motivating factor in the lives of historical actors. The opening chapters document how religion fostered community in Los Angeles in the first half of the twentieth century. The second section examines how physical encounters—such as those involving Chinese immigrants, Hermanos Penitentes, and Pueblo dancers—shaped religious and racial encounters in the West. The final essays investigate racial and religious identity among the Latter-day Saints and southern California Muslims. As these contributions clearly show, race, religion, and region are as critical as gender, sexuality, and class in understanding the melting pot that is the West. By depicting the West as a unique site for understanding race and religion, they open a new window on how we view all of America.

Bonds of Union

Bonds of Union PDF

Author: Bridget Ford

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-02-05

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1469626233

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This vivid history of the Civil War era reveals how unexpected bonds of union forged among diverse peoples in the Ohio-Kentucky borderlands furthered emancipation through a period of spiraling chaos between 1830 and 1865. Moving beyond familiar arguments about Lincoln's deft politics or regional commercial ties, Bridget Ford recovers the potent religious, racial, and political attachments holding the country together at one of its most likely breaking points, the Ohio River. Living in a bitterly contested region, the Americans examined here--Protestant and Catholic, black and white, northerner and southerner--made zealous efforts to understand the daily lives and struggles of those on the opposite side of vexing human and ideological divides. In their common pursuits of religious devotionalism, universal public education regardless of race, and relief from suffering during wartime, Ford discovers a surprisingly capacious and inclusive sense of political union in the Civil War era. While accounting for the era's many disintegrative forces, Ford reveals the imaginative work that went into bridging stark differences in lived experience, and she posits that work as a precondition for slavery's end and the Union's persistence.

Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America

Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America PDF

Author: Gary Orfield

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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In many respects, religion was a bedrock of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Theology infused the spirit and rhetoric of the movement, churches served as the gathering place for its followers, and men of the cloth--foremost among them the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.--led the perilous journey that changed the nation.Today, the quest for improving the lives of racial minorities and pursuing justice is less a "movement" and more a collection of diffuse efforts to fend off a retrenchment from affirmative action and nondiscrimination laws, improve economic prospects for residents of low-income urban neighborhoods, and organize grass-roots political activities. In that context, the relationships between religion and civil rights have become less obvious and more complex.This volume of essays takes stock of the ways in which different religions, their leaders, and their followers now see their role in promoting civil rights. Developed in conjunction with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, this book is the first in a series edited by Gary Orfield and Holly J. Lebowitz. Authors include Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center; Robin Lovin, dean of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University; David Chappell, a Buddhist scholar at the University of Hawaii; Amina Waddud, an Islam expert at Virginia Commonwealth University; Reuven Kimmelman at Brandeis University; and Allan Figueroa Deck, professor at the Loyola Institute for Spirituality.

Christianity and Race in the American South

Christianity and Race in the American South PDF

Author: Paul Harvey

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 022641549X

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The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, and water—from St. Augustine on the shores of Florida’s Atlantic Coast to the swampy mire of Jamestown to the floodwaters that nearly destroyed New Orleans. Determination, resistance, survival, even transcendence, shape the story of race and southern Christianities. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey gives us a narrative history of the South as it integrates into the story of religious history, fundamentally transforming our understanding of the importance of American Christianity and religious identity. Harvey chronicles the diversity and complexity in the intertwined histories of race and religion in the South, dating back to the first days of European settlement. He presents a history rife with strange alliances, unlikely parallels, and far too many tragedies, along the way illustrating that ideas about the role of churches in the South were critically shaped by conflicts over slavery and race that defined southern life more broadly. Race, violence, religion, and southern identity remain a volatile brew, and this book is the persuasive historical examination that is essential to making sense of it.

Gender, Race and Religion

Gender, Race and Religion PDF

Author: Martin Bulmer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-02

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1317995694

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Gender, Race and Religion brings together a selection of original papers published in Ethnic and Racial Studies that address the intersections between gender relations, race and religion in our contemporary environment. Chapters address both theoretical and empirical aspects of this phenomenon, and although written from the perspective of quite different national, social and political situations, they are linked by a common concern to analyze the interface between gender and other situated social relationships, from both a conceptual and a policy angle. These are issues that have been the subject of intense scholarly research and analysis in recent years, as well as forming part of public debates about the significance of gender, race and religion as sites of identity formation and mobilization in our changing global environment. The substantive chapters bring together insights from both theoretical reflection and empirical research in order to investigate particular facets of these questions. Gender, Race and Religion addresses issues that are at the heart of contemporary scholarly debates in the field of race and ethnic studies, and engages with important questions in policy and public debates. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Religion and Public Life in the South

Religion and Public Life in the South PDF

Author: Charles Reagan Wilson

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780759106352

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In July 2002 chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court had a two-ton monument of the Ten Commandments placed into the rotunda of the Montgomery state judicial building. But this action is only a recent case in the long history of religiously inspired public movements in the American South. From the Civil War to the Scopes Trial to the Moral Majority, white Southern evangelicals have taken ideas they see as drawn from the Christian Scriptures and tried to make them into public law. But blacks, women, subregions, and other religious groups too vie for power within and outside this Southern Religious Establishment. Religion and Public Life in the South gives voice to both the establishment and its dissenters and shows why more than any other region of the country, religion drives public debate in the South.

Creole Religions of the Caribbean, Third Edition

Creole Religions of the Caribbean, Third Edition PDF

Author: Margarite Fernández Olmos

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1479803537

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An updated introduction to the religions developed in the Caribbean region Creole Religions of the Caribbean offers a comprehensive introduction to the overlapping religions that have developed as a result of the creolization process. Caribbean peoples drew on the variants of Christianity brought by European colonizers, as well as on African religious and healing traditions and the remnants of Amerindian practices, to fashion new systems of belief. From Vodou, Santería, Regla de Palo, the Abakuá Secret Society, and Obeah to Quimbois and Espiritismo, the volume traces the historical–cultural origins of the major Creole religions, as well as the newer traditions such as Rastafari. This third edition updates the scholarship by featuring new critical approaches that have been brought to bear on the study of religion, such as queer studies, environmental studies, and diasporic studies. The third edition also expands the regional considerations of the diaspora to the US Latinx communities that are influenced by Creole spiritual practices, taking into account the increased significance of material culture?art, music, literature, and healing practices influenced by Creole religions.

Modern Religion, Modern Race

Modern Religion, Modern Race PDF

Author: Theodore Vial

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 019021256X

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Religion is a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly mentioned. In Modern Religion, Modern Race Theodore Vial argues that because the categories of religion and race are rooted in the post-Enlightenment project of reimagining what it means to be human, we cannot simply will ourselves to stop using them. Only by acknowledging that religion is already racialized can we begin to understand how the two concepts are intertwined and how they operate in our modern world. It has become common to argue that the category religion is not universal, or even very old, but is a product of Europe's Enlightenment modernization. Equally common is the argument that religion is not an innocent category of analysis, but is implicated in colonial regimes of control and as such plays a role in Europe's process of identity construction of itself and of non-European "others." Current debates about race follow an eerily similar trajectory: race is not an ancient but a modern construction. It is part of the project of colonialism, and race discourse forms one of the cornerstones of modern European identity-making. Why can't we stop using them, or re-construct them in less toxic ways? By examining the theories of Kant, Herder, and Schleiermacher, among others, Vial uncovers co-constitutive nature of race and religion, describes how they became building blocks of the modern world, and shows how the two concepts continue to be used today to form identity and to make sense of the world. He shows that while we disdain the racist language of some of the founders of religious studies, the continued influence of the modern worldview they helped create leads us, often unwittingly, to reiterate many of the same distinctions and hierarchies. Although it may not be time to abandon the very category of religion, with all its attendant baggage, Modern Religion, Modern Race calls for us to examine that baggage critically, and to be fully conscious of the ways in which religion always carries with it dangerous ideas of race.