The New Black Gods

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Edward Curtis and Danielle Sigler have edited what looks to be a fantastic new collection of essays on Arthur Huff Fauset and African American religious traditions. Titled The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religion, essays cover multiple traditions and explore many issues in the field. Religion in American History's own Kathryn Lofton has an essay. Among many others, this collection of essays might be beneficially read alongside Edward Blum's work on Du Bois, Barbara Savage's new work on Black religion and politics, Wallace Best's study of Black Chicago and religion, and Curtis Evans's book The Burden of Black Religion.




Here's a description from the Indiana University Press web site:
Taking the influential work of Arthur Huff Fauset as a starting point to break down the false dichotomy that exists between mainstream and marginal, a new generation of scholars offers fresh ideas for understanding the religious expressions of African Americans in the United States. Fauset's 1944 classic, Black Gods of the Metropolis, launched original methods and theories for thinking about African American religions as modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic. The essays in this collection show the diversity of African American religion in the wake of the Great Migration and consider the full field of African American religion from Pentecostalism to Black Judaism, Black Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. As a whole, they create a dynamic, humanistic, and thoroughly interdisciplinary understanding of African American religious history and life. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies the African American experience.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Introduction / Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler

Part 1. New Religious Movement(s) of the Great Migration Era
1. Fauset's (Missing) Pentecostals: Church Mothers, Remaking Respectability, and Religious Modernism / Clarence Hardy
2. "Grace Has Given God a Vacation": The History and Development of the Theology of the United House of Prayer of All People / Danielle Brune Sigler
3. "Chased out of Palestine": Prophet Cherry's Church of God and Early Black Judaisms in the United States / Nora L. Rubel
4. Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History / Edward E. Curtis IV
5. "The Consciousness of God's Presence Will Keep You Well, Healthy, Happy, and Singing": The Tradition of Innovation in the Music of Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement / Leonard Norman Primiano
6. "A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist": Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis / Jacob S. Dorman

Part 2. Resurrecting Fauset's Vision for African American Religious Studies
7. Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions / Sylvester A. Johnson
8. The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography / Kathryn Lofton
9. Turning African Americans into Rational Actors: The Important Legacy of Fauset's Functionalism / Carolyn Rouse
10. Defining the "Negro Problem" in Brazil: The Shifting Significance of Brazil's African Heritage from the 1890s to the 1940s / Kelly E. Hayes
11. Fauset and His Black Gods: Intersections with the Herskovits-Frazier Debate / Stephen W. Angell