Workshop on Race and Religion:

Thought, Practice and Meaning

Workshop Description

This workshop seeks to address the ideas, meanings, and practices of the sacred within racially marginalized communities.  In addition, this workshop also seeks to examine the way the social construction of race impacts how we think about religion.  Moreover, this workshop acknowledges both an intellectual conviction to the exploration of religion among racialized peoples and a commitment to engaging with and clarifying the impact of religion in racialized communities.  We convene this workshop to provide a forum for graduate students and faculty at the University of Chicago and area institutions to explore the dynamics and problems of race and religion.  The workshop is cosponsored by Professors Dwight Hopkins and Omar McRoberts and coordinated by Antonia Daymond and Paul Robeson Ford of the Divinity School.

This workshop will meet on a bi-weekly basis, starting on the second week of every quarter, on Tuesdays at 4:15pm in Room 400 in Swift Hall of the University of Chicago Divinity School.  Here is a map to Swift Hall.

2007 Autumn Schedule

Tuesday, October 2: Edward Blum, Assistant Professor of History, San Diego State University.

Lecture and discussion on “ ‘Help for God's Sake!’: How W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes Tried to Save Jesus.” Participants are asked to read the Introduction and Chapter Four of Blum’s W.E.B. DuBois: American Prophet.

Response by Omar McRoberts, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago.

Tuesday, October 16: Alain Weaver, Ph.D. Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago.

Lecture and discussion on “Ideologies of Difference and Heterogeneous Spaces in Israel-Palestine.”

Tuesday, October 30:  LeRhonda Manigault, Department of Religion, Wake Forest University.  (Swift 106)

Lecture and discussion on “Listening to the Dead Speak: Gullah/Geechee Women and the Ethnographic Imagination.”

Tuesday, November 13:  Bernard C. Dorsey, Ph.D. Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago.

Lecture and discussion on “Deity and Deviance: The Dissonance of Black Male Sexuality.”

Tuesday, November 27: John Howell, Ph.D. Student, Divinity School, University of Chicago.

Lecture and discussion on “That a nation might be born: Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman as American National Myth.” Download a copy of the paper.

2008 Winter Schedule

Tuesday, January 15: James Logan, Assistant Professor of Religion, Earlham College.

Lecture and discussion on “Healing Memory, Ontological Intimacy, and U.S. Imprisonment: Toward a Christian Politics of ‘Good Punishment’.”

Tuesday, January 29. Christopher Griffin, Ph.D. Student, Divinity School, University of Chicago.

Lecture and discussion: “Love and Self-love in Martin and Malcolm.” Download the paper.

Tuesday, February 12: Cathy J. Cohen, Deputy Provost for Graduate Education, David and

Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago. This session will meet in Swift 106.

Lecture and discussion: "From Kanye West to Barack Obama: Black Youth, Alienation and the Future of U.S. Politics."

Tuesday, February 26. Karl Lampley, Ph.D. Student, Divinity School, University of Chicago.

Lecture and discussion: “White Supremacy in Modern America.”

Tuesday, March 11. Santiago Pinon, Ph.D. Student, Divinity School, University of Chicago. Swift 201.

Lecture and discussion: “A Legal Defense of the Natives in the New World: Francisco Vitoria and Ius Gentium.”

2008 Spring Schedule

Tuesday, April 8 (Swift Lecture Hall – 3^rd Floor)::

Charles H. Long, Professor Emeritus, Department of Religious Studies, University of California – Santa Barbara, Presenting

James Noel, Associate Professor of American Religion, San Francisco Theological Seminary, Responding

Participants are asked to be familiar with Long’s seminal volume Significations, and to review three articles: “Religion, Discourse, and Hermeneutics: New Approaches in the Study of Religion” (download here), “Bodies in Time and the Healing of Spaces: Religion, Temporalities, and Health” (download here), and “African American Religion in the United States of America: An Interpretive Essay” (available in the Dean’s Office in Swift Hall).

Tuesday, April 22. Tobin Miller Shearer, Assistant Professor of History, University of Montana. (Swift Hall Room 201; session begins at 4:30)

Lecture and discussion: “Daily Demonstrators: African American Fresh Air Children as Civil Rights Actors, 1950-1971.” Download the manuscript.

Tuesday, May 6.

Tuesday, May 20. Sarah Imhoff, Ph.D. Candidate, Divinity School, University of Chicago. (Swift Hall Room 201; session begins at 4:30)

Lecture and discussion: “Race, Science, Gender, and the American Jew: 1900-1920.” Download the paper.

On Tuesday, April 8^th, the Race and Religion Workshop will be honored to welcome Charles H. Long, emeritus professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and former director of the Center for Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Long will discuss “Reflections on African American Religions, Past and Present.”

Prof. Long is the author of Alpha, The Myths of Creation, The History of Religions: Essays in Understanding and Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion.

Dr. Long has also taught at Duke University, the University of Cape Town (South Africa), as well as the Universities of Michigan and of Missouri.

He has been a consultant to numerous organizations, including the African Heritage Museum and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was one of the founding editors of the journal History of Religions and of the book series Studies in Religion. He was also a founding member of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and president of that organization from 1987 to 1990.

Prof. Long will be joined in conversation by James Noel, the H. Eugene Farlough, Jr. California Professor of African American Christianity at San Francisco Theological Seminary. Prof. Noel is an expert in the field of American Church History, and his research focuses on the History of African American Christianity, Black Religion in African and the Americas, and African American Social, Cultural and Intellectual History. For more information on James Noel, visit his website: www.sfts.edu/noel/.

A reception in the Common Room will follow the session.

Contact Information

For more information or to sign up for our mailing list, please contact one of our workshop coordinators, Paul Robeson Ford (fordp@uchicago.edu) or Antonia Daymond (adaymond@uchicago.edu).