Jonathan Walton Speaking at ENC

Randall Stephens

Jonathan Walton (Assistant Professor of African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School) will give a public lecture on "The Preachers' Blues: Reclaiming Authority on Wax," Wednesday, April 13, 4:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall, Eastern Nazarene College, Quincy, MA.

Walton, a social ethicist and African American religious studies scholar, is the author of Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of African American Religious Broadcasting (New York University Press, 2009) a groundbreaking study on religion, media, and theology. Cornel West (Princeton University) describes the book as "the best work we have on the complex dynamics of the Black megachurch phenomenon. Walton is a brilliant cultural critic and courageous prophetic voice!" James Cone (Union Theological Seminary) lauds Watch This! as "An important examination of the Black Electronic Church. Jonathan Walton brings new insights into the major TV evangelists in the African American community."

Professor Walton will speak at ENC on the history of the religious "race" record industry and the the cultural ethos and competing ethical values of black Christian communities during the 1920s and 1930s. Like all forms of mass culture, says Walton,

religious records served multiple purposes and were interpreted by listeners at varying registers. For many, religious recordings were spiritually edifying and liberating, just as they were wildly entertaining. Critics have show that these religious recordings contested the aesthetic values of the black middle class even as they reinforced bourgeois behavioral codes. By turning our attention to the shared interests of male preachers and the recording industry, I describe how sermons stressing personal piety and culturally familiar stereotypes shaped cultural debates concerning the style, content, and purpose of evangelical preaching in the 20th century.

Thomas Kidd Lecture, Fri, Oct 15, Eastern Nazarene College

Randall Stephens

A note for any of y'all who live near Boston.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, at 3:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall, Eastern Nazarene College, Quincy, Mass: Thomas S. Kidd (Baylor University), "God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution." The Donald S. Metz Lecture in American Christian History.

Thomas Kidd is the author of a variety of books and article on American religion in the colonial and revolutionary eras. His The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America was published by Yale in 2007. University of Notre Dame historian Mark Noll described the book as “Well researched, clearly written and authoritatively argued. There is no book of comparable breadth, either chronologically or geographically.” Kidd also published The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents, with Bedford Books in 2007. His American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. Walter Russell Mead thus praised American Christians and Islam in Foreign Affairs: “This concise and well-organized study offers readers an excellent summary of American popular attitudes toward Islam from the eighteenth century onward.”

Kidd will be speaking on his new book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010), which Harry Stout described as "a history of religion and the American Revolution that addresses the revolutionary war in substantial detail. Thomas Kidd brilliantly examines the role of religion in the Revolution, and explores the intersection of religion and the Republic, neither of which can be fully understood without reference to the other. Kidd demonstrates in persuasive detail how the idea of religious liberty informed the meaning of the Republic at its deepest level."

The lecture is part of a series on colonial America. Gordon Wood and Jill Lepore will speak on campus in November.