In recent years, references to Creflo Dollar, arguably the most popular black prosperity preacher of the day, have become a visual and verbal fixture in Hip Hop music. Such instances include a cameo appearance in Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri’s “Welcome to Atlanta” video, an invocation in a song by Fifty Cent, a professed pastoral affiliation by Mase, and a shout-out from Lupe Fiasco in his underground re-mix of Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” This would seem to suggest, at least within the culture of the bling, that Christianity has become as much a signifier of wealth and power as it is evidence of any specific type of theological vision. Evidently Dollar – for whom wealth is a core spiritual value – seems to embody, for many Hip Hop artists, the essence of Hip Hop’s hustle doused in holy water. Interestingly, Pastor Dollar also has a rap video in the works, performed a by a group of rappers, the Ziklag Boyz, who belong to his church and record on his Arrow Records label. A surprise to no one, the song’s refrain is simply, “Money, money, coming down!” (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFyMEnXDG4g ). While the video draws much resemblance to Lil’ Wayne and Fat Joe’s tale of the strip club, “Make It Rain,” – with dollar bills floating across the screen – noticeably absent from the Ziklag Boyz’ video are the bodies of scantily clad black and brown women. For male rappers, it is the bodies of black females that often make their rap videos so profitably seductive, but Dollar insists that the power to get “bling” can just as easily be achieved dropping bible verses like they’re hot. The mutual resonance between much of rap music and Dollar’s prosperity ministry is but one instance where Christianity seems to function as an explicit form of social capital in popular culture . . .

For the entire article go to: http://faithinmotion.net/

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It has been well over one month since I last made a post to my blog…

Much has transpired during this time that would typically be the type of material that I hope to engage and interrogate on this page, but for too many reasons I have chosen to abstain - to simply read rather than write. Nonetheless, I am thankful for the prodigious efforts of bloggers, much more faithful than I, who have continued to offer tremendous insights into a number of occurrences that have piqued my interest, including several obvious incidents:

• The Violent Break-up of Thomas Weeks and Juanita Bynum
• The building of a critical mass in support of the Jena Six
• The appearance of additional “nooses” not only in the South, but up north in such places as Hempstead’s Police Headquarters (Long Island) and Columbia University’s Teachers College
• The latest black morality tale in the release of Tyler Perry’s most recent movie, “Why did I get married?”
• ANOTHER scandal connected to my undergraduate alma mater - Oral Roberts University. Oh, ORU…
• The debut of BET’s new show “Exalted” - a behind the scenes look at some of America’s most popular black clergy

The list could go on ad infinitum…

However, as I write today I am fresh off the heals of a wonderful retreat with a small group of friends - most of whom are pastors serving churches across the United States - that took place in a small coastal town on Massachusetts’ North Shore. We have been meeting as a group for seven years now, and more than anything else the time serves for me as a chance to check in with a group of great colleagues and friends who are as ambitious about being good parents to their children, loving partners to their spouses, and supportive friends to, well, their friends, as they are in their professional lives. Over the weekend we read, prayed, cried, talked, ate and drank with each other. What almost always emerges most powerfully out of these incredibly honest exchanges - which is most important to me - are deep, tear-jerking belly laughs that are not always as easy to find every day. They serve to remind us that our lives need not always be as serious as we are prone to treating them and that, to paraphrase a bible verse “… laughter does the heart good, like medicine…”

In this spirit, I invite you to check out an essay by Hannah Rosin from the Book Review section of the October 14 New York Times. The book under discussion sounds something like “Borat in Bible-Drag” and I hope it will provide plenty of laughs as a balance to all the serious debates about what is up for grabs in the contemporary religious landscape. As I am reminded of a course I took during graduate school in which Cornel West pointed to the fact that not once does Christian scripture record Jesus laughing, just this once I encourage you to - forgive me - Do What Jesus Didn’t Do:

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October 14, 2007

By the Book

By HANNA ROSIN

THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY

One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

By A. J. Jacobs.

Illustrated. 388 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.

If I were to write this review while trying to live biblically, here are some of the rules I would have to follow:

Love thy neighbor. Jacobs is a fellow journalist and thus a neighbor of sorts. I would have to strive to be as generous as possible, and point out right at the outset that this book is an inspired idea and that Jacobs is alarmingly adept at keeping the joke alive for 365 days.

Thou shalt not covet. I would have to confess my jealousy that Jacobs already had a movie contract in place before the book had even been published, and that even though I have spent much more time around young-earth creationists than he has, he thought of a much funnier way to describe them (people who believe in an earth that’s ”barely older than Gene Hackman”).

Thou shalt not bear false witness. I would have to admit that every once in a while, as he wrote about walking down some New York street in a shepherd’s robe strumming his 10-string harp, or throwing small stones at a random suspected sinner, or eating crickets or burning myrrh each morning, I thought to myself, What’s the point, really?

But having a point is slightly beside the point. Jacobs is a stunt journalist, although that term seems belittling to the monumental self-improvement projects he subjects himself to. In his last book, ”The Know-It-All,” Jacobs read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in an attempt to make himself smarter than his showoff brother-in-law.

In ”The Year of Living Biblically,” he attends to the soul, turning himself from a guy who is ”Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant” into a follower of ”the ultimate biblical life.” This means spending a year strictly following a typed list of more than 700 biblical rules, including the obscure (don’t wear garments of mixed fibers, bind money to your hand, pay the wages of your workers every day) and the potentially awkward (don’t touch your wife seven days after her ”discharge of blood,” bathe after sex and don’t tell lies, in their many variations).

Unlike Norah Vincent (who wrote a book about passing as a man) and Eddie Murphy (who made himself over as a white man in a classic ”Saturday Night Live” skit), Jacobs does not take the undercover spy route. Instead he lives out the biblical high life in his usual New York surroundings, among all his wanton, gossiping, blaspheming journalist friends. The result is that he ends up sort of like Kramer on ”Seinfeld,” a big weirdo who interrupts the normal patter of urban life. Lots of comic relief ensues. He accepts a hug from a homeless woman on the subway, who then accuses him of harassing her. He contemplates taking his cute nanny as his second wife. He grows a beard of ZZ Top-like proportions.

His efforts to obey the injunction against lying are an endless source of sit-com moments. He refuses to tell his son that an English muffin is a form of bagel, prompting a massive temper tantrum. He and his wife run into an old college acquaintance of hers at a restaurant. When the friend suggests they get their kids together sometime for a play date, he tells the friend he’ll ”take a pass” because he doesn’t ”really want new friends right now.” His wife, of course, wants to kill him.

The larger context for this book is that we live in age of flourishing biblical literalism, where a lot of Americans who don’t live in New York still believe the Bible to be literally true. Jacobs does make dutiful visits to an Amish community, Jerry Falwell’s church in Virginia and a new creationist museum in Kentucky. But his visits yield no tremendous insights about why the United States continues to be such a literal-minded nation, or what comforts people derive from refusing to read between the lines. They merely leave him feeling confused and depressed.

This is a New Testament nation, but most of the rules that make for good comedy are in the other book. So Jacobs’s most lively interactions by far are not with red-state America but with his own people: Mr. Berkowitz, the guy who comes over to check for shatnez, or mixed fibers; or his Uncle Gil, the inspiration for Jacobs’s project.

Gil is the person Jacobs fears he could become if he really took the project to heart. Gil, too, started out as a secular Jew on a spiritual mission. But then he got in too deep. He careered, Jacobs tells us, from acid head to Hindu to cult leader to born-again Christian to ultra-Orthodox Jew who gathers in the lost souls of Jerusalem. Jacobs has dinner with him, and leaves with the impression that Gil is ‘’subtly dangerous.”

Jacobs comes closest to transcendence in a crowd of Hasidic men dancing ecstatically all night. But otherwise he skirts around the edges. The truly Orthodox would say you can’t do this alone, in your apartment, with your wife rolling her eyes. You need a community, not some stranger rabbis who drop by once in a while. Alone, Jacobs can ponder the big questions, but he usually turns them into a joke. (”If there is a God, why would he allow war, disease and my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Barker, who forced us to have a sugar-free bake sale?”)

Jacobs begins the book by saying that if his new self met his old at a coffee shop they would think each other ”delusional.” I’m not sure he makes the case for that much of a transformation. But here and there, through some surprisingly poignant moments, he sees through to the other side, and he stumbles his way to a working definition of what it might mean to become a better person.

At the start of the year, his mind cleansing is yet more sit-com fodder: remove the magazine with Jessica Alba in a skintight bathing suit, the wedding album picture of the friend with cleavage, the Celestial Tea box showing the hot geisha. Stop self-Googling. Don’t be jealous of Jonathan Safran Foer’s speaking fees. Don’t check your e-mail on the Sabbath.

But toward the end, he deepens. A friend e-mails him a YouTube clip of a newscaster who gets smacked in the head by a stage light and falls over. Jacobs can’t bring himself to ”lol” as his friends do. He finds it upsetting. He spends 20 minutes trying to track down the newscaster’s e-mail address so he can ask if she’s all right, while at the same time worrying that he’s become some kind of ”overly virtuous sap.”

After a year of praying every day he becomes by no stretch a believer, but someone who at least accepts ‘’such a thing as sacredness.” Sometimes he can even envision a God who might watch over him and care what happens. As a teenager he convinced himself that even when he was alone in his house, the girls he had a crush on could see him, so he listened to David Bowie and brushed his teeth in a ”rakishly nonchalant manner” to prove he was worthy of their attention. This is how he experiences God now.

God as Mean Girl. It’s not exactly biblical, but it’s not nothing.

For all I know, Jacobs is already back to his old ways He never gives the impression that, God forbid, his soul is at stake, or anything else of much importance. Certainly his isn’t the kind of transformation any real fundamentalist would accept. But for many of us who would never even try, walking with Jacobs is the closest we’ll come to knowing what it feelslike to be born again.

Hanna Rosin is the author of ”God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America.”

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As many of you know, the vast majority of my working hours these days are spent trying to grind out a dissertation that looks at the ways black artists have engaged questions of religion and spirituality in their personal lives, creative writing and critical work. Currently, my mind is occupied with the 1960s-mid-1970s, the era of the radically black pronouncements of artists such as Sonia Sanchez and Larry Neal, along with the “omni” Americanist critiques of folks like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. This was the period that would give birth to the formal field of Black Theology… and so much more. One of the most prominent writers of the period would be Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka. In 1975, in his black marxist phase, Baraka offered his own critique of Christianity in the poem, “When We’ll Worship Jesus,” claiming -

“we’ll worship Jesus when mao do, when toure does, when the cross replaces Nkrumah’s star Jesus need to hurt some of our enemies, then we’ll check him out, all that screaming and hollering & wallering and moaning talking about Jesus”

This was the Black Arts Movement!

Although the angle of engagement has continually shifted, the substance of religion and spirituality have remained a source of compelling critique and/or dramatic celebration for artists, black, white and other.

While I struggle right now to sort through the sixties, my next chapter will involve a close look at the shift from black power advocates to generation Hip Hop. To this end, I wanted to share with you a review I’ve published on line for popmatters of a book that encapsulated much of the confusion and conflicts that often surface at the intersection of religion, race and the arts. What follows is an excerpt from the article:

“While the rise of gangsta’ rap to national prominence in the late 1980s led some critics to claim that hip-hop suffered from a nihilistic crisis, those who have followed the music more closely remained unmoved in their insistence that hip-hop’s spiritual core maintained a steadfast strength. Over its history, including its public evolution from rap music to hip-hop culture—or vice versa depending upon whose telling the story—religious and spiritual themes have continued to occupy a central place in this now global phenomenon. From MC Hammer’s gospel tribute “Son of the King” on his first album, through the Afrocentric musings of X-Clan, the Nation of Islam-informed lens of Public Enemy, the five-percent philosophies of Brand Nubian, the Islamic orthodoxy of Mos Def, and the return of explicitly Christian content in the words of DMX and Kanye West, religious diversity has been the rule of rap music.

The complexities of hip-hop’s religious vision crystallized most dramatically in its two most iconic figures and most memorable martyrs, Tupac and Biggie…” For the full article, click here: popmatters.com

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From the vantagepoint of the “modern” world, religion has often been viewed as a lingering artifact of ancient times. Over the course of the 20th century all too many folks have argued that the world was witness to an ongoing process of secularization, leading some to proclaim that “God is Dead!”

Much to the contrary, however, religious traditions have remained robust, bearing witness to the reality of something more breaking through human experience. In this light, to be religious in the modern (and postmodern) world has meant a delicate negotiation of one’s tradition with the novelties of the world’s new technologies. In my last blog entry, this balancing act was performed on the steel guitar used as an instrument of worship in Sanctified churches…

… but it has also been seen throughout U.S. history in the creation of segregated (along lines of race and/or gender) pews

… in the recording of sermons by C.L. Franklin and others on vinyl

… at the intersection of Christian scripture and black power in Albert Cleage’s “Black Messiah” and James Cone’s “Black Theology

… and in the more recent blending of break beats and bibles in the formation of Gospel (aka Holy) Hip Hop

Such mixtures have often involved an ironic - and at times apparently contradictory - creolizing of things old and new, all testifying to what it means to be called a religious modern.

Recently, while spending time with my nephew and niece I had the chance to suffer, while admittedly laughing, through the profane hilarity that is Eddie Murphy’s humor in his recent film Norbit, only to the see the movie end and seemlessly transition into the credits while Kirk Franklin ’s gospel played in the background - for some this is a no doubt a troubling example of modern religion.

Only a few days earlier, however, while reading the Sunday New York Times, I was introduced to an image that I just had to share. What follows is an incredible example of urban religious modernity twenty-first century style: a mass street baptismal service hosted by Harlem’s United House of Prayer for all People - the church founded by Charles “Daddy” Grace. See the below article and check out the video footage at the following link: Reborn in Harlem and let me know what you think.

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NEW YORK TIMES

August 12, 2007

New York In Focus

Doused for the Lord

By EMILY BRADY

LAST Sunday, an 82-year-old woman from Jamaica, Queens, named Beatrice Vaughn, dressed all in white, donned a straw hat covered with brightly colored plastic pompoms and set out to cleanse her soul. It was time for Ms. Vaughn and the other members of her church, the United House of Prayer for All People in Harlem, to be baptized.

On this and every other first Sunday of August since the 1930s, hundreds of church members clad in white have gathered on a closed-off section of West 115th Street near Fifth Avenue to wash away their sins and absorb the healing power of a blessed water that rains down on them from a fire hose.

Ms. Vaughn danced out in front of the crowd, shuffling her feet and bobbing her unmistakable hat to the infectious sound of a brass band. Around her was a sea of white.

“I have the Holy Ghost and fire in me,” she said later.

Occasionally, a pair of hands would rise above the crowd and shake, palms forward, as if soaking up the energy.

At midday, three cars inched through the gathering. Out of one of them popped the church’s national leader, Bishop S. C. Madison, who is 88 and is affectionately known as “Daddy Madison.” A frail man in black robes whose gray hair grazes his shoulders, the bishop was helped up the stairs to a small wooden stage. He, too, began to clap and shuffle.

“All you gots to do,” instructed a man standing nearby, “is stand there and let the heavens open.”

Minutes later, an arch of water gushed out of a hose onto the crowd. Under the downpour, the band continued playing, the faithful kept dancing, and a year’s worth of troubles of the soul were washed onto the hot asphalt.

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The old adage that all black popular musicians get there start in the church has been played out to the point of cliche. Nonetheless, with the exception of Hip Hop - although many folk will make the claim that the mc is linked to a lineage that traces back through the preacher to African griots - cultural idioms nurtured in black churches have played an all too formidable force in the formation of popular cultures the world over. What follows is an insightful recent article from the New York Times that captures some of the creative ironies that emerge at the intersections of “sacred and secular.”

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NEW YORK TIMES - August 5, 2007
Music
Singers Grounded by Sacred Roots
By GEOFFREY HIMES

BALTIMORE

WHEN Ryan Shaw performed at the Artscape festival here last month, he brought a refreshing authenticity to the soul-revival movement that has made stars out of Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone and John Legend. Mr. Shaw, 26, could shake the oldies dust off songs from the late 1950s and early ’60s because he came to the music the same way the originals did: in the black church. And when he sang “Nobody,” his own composition and the new single from his debut album, “This Is Ryan Shaw” (Columbia/One Haven/Red Ink), it resembled the hymns that Ray Charles and Wilson Pickett once turned into pop hits by changing a few words.

Mr. Shaw, who was born in Georgia and now lives in Brooklyn, invited the sun-baked fans to imagine themselves with him in the Free Church of God in Christ of Atlanta, where he learned to sing. Sporting a black shirt with red piping and a bundle of thin braids with burnt orange tips, he sang the familiar words to “If I Had a Hammer,” delivered in the soul style of Sam Cooke. And when he led the crowd in a call-and-response sing-along, he swooped his outstretched arms as if he were still a choir director.

But he’s not a choir director anymore, and he would have trouble returning to the post given the mixed reactions to his pop music career. While some of his fellow churchgoers have been supportive, others have told him that he’s going to hell for singing secular music. Mr. Shaw acknowledged that he couldn’t sing the way he does if not for all those years in church, but he added that such criticism can make it difficult to grow as an artist.

“It’s that Catch-22,” he explained backstage at Artscape. “The traditions of the church allow it to preserve musical styles that might otherwise be lost, but it can also make for stagnation. Things are always changing in youth culture, especially in black music, and young people want to hear those changes in church.

“If the church gives in too easily to those changes, gospel music will lose its identity,” he said, “but if it resists those changes too much, it will alienate the youth. That’s why you have all these battles about what is gospel music and what God wants to hear.”

It’s a familiar story: A musician tries to take the music he learned in church out into the pop marketplace, and the church reacts by shutting its doors on the apostate. From Georgia Tom Dorsey, the minister’s son who played the blues for Ma Rainey in the 1920s; to Al Green, who gave up pop stardom to become a minister himself in the 1970s; to Robert Randolph, who was barred from playing in church after becoming a jam-band star in this decade, hundreds of artists have taken their turns as protagonists in this tale.

It is usually told in terms of a forward-thinking youngster and a hidebound institution, but it’s more complicated than that. If Mr. Shaw’s church, for example, hadn’t been so stubbornly old-fashioned, he never would have mastered the art of melodic shouting and never would have sounded so natural when he turned to retro-soul. Maybe these churches provide a valuable service by being narrow-minded about music.

“There are so few areas in popular culture that remain untouched by the mainstream,” said Peter Guralnick, author of “Sweet Soul Music” and “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke,” “that any area that remains separate and retains its attachment to a tradition is going to sound pure and distinctive.

“Some churches are more untouched than others, but all of them tend to preserve older styles of American music, whether you’re talking about soul music or bluegrass. That’s especially true in this era of hip-hop and rap, which are really the first popular forms of black music in my lifetime that haven’t sprung directly from the church.”

It’s funny, Mr. Shaw said, what churches will and won’t accept. “When R&B started using jazzy chords like 7ths, 9ths and 13ths, you couldn’t use them in church because that was ‘the devil’s music,’ ” he said. “But as soon as R&B moved on to something else, suddenly it was O.K. to use those chords because the devil wasn’t using them anymore.

“Just like in the clothes world, where some stores will sell last year’s fashions, the church often ends up using the last decade’s R&B fashions.”

Thus stars like Kirk Franklin and Da’ T.R.U.T.H. might bring funk and old-school rap to the gospel charts, but there’s still a time lag between the sounds on urban radio and those on gospel radio. And in more conservative churches you’ll find the styles of ’60s soul, ’50s doo-wop or ’40s quartets perfectly preserved. If you want to learn the craft of those genres, the church is the place to study.

“My church was very traditional,” Mr. Shaw said, “and for a long time the only songs I learned were gospel songs. It was a very aggressive kind of singing. We didn’t warm into a song. We were in it full throttle from the get-go. When I moved to New York and got a job at the Motown Cafe, those Motown songs felt like the music I’d been singing all my life, even if the lyrics and melodies were different.”

Sometimes a black church incubates a style that doesn’t exist anywhere else. That’s the case with the House of God, which adopted the steel guitar, an instrument associated with Hawaiian and country music, and adapted it to its liturgy.

If you had attended the House of God’s national assembly in Nashville in 2000, you might have seen a 22-year-old nobody in a brown pinstripe suit sitting behind a pedal steel guitar. As the preachers thundered and the congregants shouted back, he laced it all together with vocal-like swoops across the 13 strings of his tablelike instrument and wild, psychedelic digressions in the distinctive style known as sacred steel.

That nobody was Robert Randolph, and within a year, thanks in part to John Medeski and the North Mississippi Allstars, who recorded with him as the Word, he was headlining at rock clubs. When he came with his Family Band to the Sonar Lounge in Baltimore in December, his signature song, “I Need More Love,” didn’t sound all that different from the processional and offertory hymns he used to play in the House of God. Mr. Randolph, who still lives in his native New Jersey, was wearing a sports jersey rather than a suit, and the lyrics spoke of love in terms of universal brotherhood rather than obeisance to a deity, but the impact was much the same.

Sitting in his tour bus before the Sonar Lounge show Mr. Randolph kept glancing at the football game on the television because he had told the story of learning to play black gospel music on an unlikely instrument dozens of times before. But when asked about playing in the church today, his expression darkened and he gazed directly at a reporter.

“We were kicked out of playing in church in 2001,” he said. “They said we were playing the blues and our songs didn’t talk about God. But my goal was to take the sound I learned in church and show that that sound can find a place in the secular world. I wanted to prove that a young kid doesn’t have to talk about drugs, guns and booty. He can be successful singing about love and happiness.”

“When blessings keep coming down on this band,” he continued, “when we get calls from Eric Clapton and Dave Matthews, when people who have listened to thousands of records hear something special in what we’re doing, I know this is what God has carved out for me. It’s not up to anyone else to tell me what his plan is.”

Maurice (Ted) Beard is one of the sacred steel guitarists that Mr. Randolph learned from during his church’s national assemblies. Today Mr. Beard, a 72-year-old Detroit pastor, is minister of music for the Keith Dominion of the House of God, and he describes Mr. Randolph as a “very gifted musician.” He said that he regrets that the younger guitarist can no longer play in church, but that he understands the decision, which came down from the chief overseer of the church.

“We really feel our musical style is something God gave us to use to enhance our worship,” Mr. Beard said, “so we should really keep it in the church. If you play out in the so-called world, you’re barred. There are different thoughts on the policy, but that’s what it is. It’s because we developed our music in the church and kept it in the church that it sounds so different from everything else.

“I’ve had offers to play out in the world, but I made a promise to my grandmother to stay in the church, so I did.”

Mr. Clapton and Mr. Matthews are both guests on “Colorblind” (Warner Brothers), the new album from Mr. Randolph, who will play at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J., next Saturday. Mr. Shaw frequently performs at all-ages festivals like Bumbershoot in Seattle; he’ll play there on Sept. 2, and he’ll play at Radio City Music Hall on Sept. 18 as part of the multi-artist Dream Concert.

Both Mr. Shaw and Mr. Randolph say they don’t care what their fellow churchgoers think of their secular careers, but neither is very convincing. They are obviously pained by the criticism and argue that far from abandoning their religion, they’re furthering it.

Mr. Shaw insisted: “As long as I’m singing about love and not being derogatory to anyone, I feel my music is still a part of Christianity, even if the songs don’t mention God. It’s the spirit behind the music and how it’s delivered that’s important.”

Mr. Randolph would agree. “Church is about spreading the word, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said. “Even though some of our songs have more of a secular sound, it’s all about life, love and understanding. Sometimes we’re in church preaching the word and we think it only applies to us in the church, but there’s a whole world out there.”

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This short entry is simultaneously a critical reflection, a word of congratulations and a note of appreciation.

A few weeks ago, after over a year of proposal revisions, committee meetings and public, university-wide hearings, the City University of New York approved a new Bachelor’s degree program in Religious Studies at Medgar Evers College. While I recently relinquished my responsibilities in order to devote full energies to finishing the dissertation, I have had the privilege of teaching in Medgar Evers’ newly formed Department of Philosophy and Religion for the past couple of years and to also participate in the development of this degree. Before I offer some thoughts on the process I want to first commend and congratulate the college’s president, Dr. Edison Jackson, Dr. Darryl Trimiew, department chair, and my friends and colleagues who teach in the department, on the approval of this important new degree program. At a time when studies show that questions of religion and spirituality are increasingly being asked on college and university campuses and when scholars are suggesting that religious literacy of students is at an all time low, the foresight of President Jackson to initiate a degree program that will equip students to think critically about the myriad religious traditions that surround them – from the religious right to “radical” Islam – deserves commendation. Congratulations are in order indeed!

Back in 2005, during my first days at Medgar Evers College, I was pleasantly surprised by the organic relationship that the college seemed to maintain with Brooklyn’s Crown Heights community in which it is located. That the school was created, amidst civil rights pressures that made their way onto college campuses during the 1960s, with an explicit mandate to serve the black diaspora that is Central Brooklyn, Medgar Evers College stands in stark contrast to so many elite universities located in close proximity to their respective ‘Hoods. It is indeed a rare example of a concretely “engaged” academic institution that balances critical thinking, knowledge-building and community development. I will remain grateful to the administration, faculty and staff at this great college for their investment in me as a professor and person during this formative stage in my career.

One of my earliest memories at Medgar Evers was the greeting I received from a couple of senior faculty, both of whom I now count as colleagues, at an orientation session. Their warm welcome was quickly followed by a somewhat sarcastic warning of a growing concern among faculty that President Jackson, who is also an ordained minister, was trying to build a seminary within the college. Never mind that nothing in the degree proposal resembled even the most remote concern with protestant proselytizing, much of this cynical thinking continued to plague the degree-making process. Given the historic relationship between HBCUs and the Black Church, perhaps such anxieties were in part warranted. For more on the spiritual ties between these two institutions, check out the blog of a good friend of mine, Jonathan L. Walton. Indeed, the case of Medgar Evers College, both an HBCU and a public college, does raise unique questions regarding the separation of church and state. However, rather than being concerned with a Christianizing of students, for which there was no evidence, such a program should have received applause, along with constructive criticism, from the outset. In addition to the quality faculty in the department – including an Islamicist, a social ethicist, a womanist scholar, historian of American religion and a philosopher – on its way to approval the degree program received support and feedback from faculty who teach religion and theology across the country, including the president-elect of the major organizational body that supports scholars of religion. Yet within the City University’s politics it was subjected to the unwarranted attacks of scholars who possess little to no background or training in the field, but felt nonetheless entitled to deem the program insufficient and theologically misguided.

In light of the religious intolerance of the post-9/11 world in which public discourse has been increasingly infused with explicit God-talk, it is essential that students have the resources necessary to cultivate a critical lens towards religious traditions both within and beyond their most immediate communities. However, in contrast to legends of religious studies professors who’ve made it their business to create a crisis of faith within their classrooms, it is equally important that faculty respect the religious traditions of their students as much as they do the theories of deconstruction detailed on their syllabi. Moreover, while students need be familiar with the multiple languages of the United States’ religiously plural society, it is increasingly important that they be able to make sense of a national history in which the Christian tradition has all too often been conflated with state power - in troubling ways, to say the least. More particularly, given that the method in which authority continues to assigned in black communities also evidences an explicitly Christian cast, it is even more essential that students at a predominantly black college like Medgar Evers be able to sort through the convoluted and confusing convergences of racial and religious rhetoric that float across the airwaves. The curriculum and faculty in Medgar Evers College’s new Department of Philosophy and Religion demonstrate both the competencies and commitment to perform each of these urgent tasks.

Fortunately, despite ill-informed criticisms of the proposal’s content and disrespectful assaults on the character of the college’s administration, the democratic processes of the City University of New York approved this innovative new program. And the students of Medgar Evers College promise to be all the better for it! What follows is a story on the program from insidehighered.com:

At CUNY, Religious Studies, or Religion?

The City University of New York Board of Trustees approved the creation of a religious studies major at Medgar Evers College on Monday, over the objections of CUNY faculty leaders who said the new program would blur the separation of church and state by focusing not on the study of religion but on the practice of certain religions.

Medgar Evers, a predominantly black college in Brooklyn, is now set to enroll its first class of students in the interdisciplinary program, which culminates in a B.A. in religious studies, this fall. The program aims to help students “explore how religion functions in and shapes the modern world and how it empowers, enlightens, limits, complicates, inspires and conflicts modern society,” the program proposal says. “Degree candidates will study and analyze the most important standard texts and investigate contemporary and historical religious practices from a global perspective, with emphasis on religions of the African Diaspora.”

The religious studies program has considerable support on the Medgar Evers campus and was approved by the college’s faculty in May 2006. Charlotte Phoenix, the college’s interim provost, said that the institution’s history of activism means that “if in fact there was faculty opposition [to the program] on this campus, everyone would have heard about it.”

At Monday’s meeting, Frederick P. Schaffer, senior vice chancellor for legal affairs and general counsel at the CUNY system, said he “saw nothing” to back up the concerns of some members of the University Faculty Senate who feared that the program might violate the Constitutional separation of church and state. The concerns, he asserted, were based not on the proposal but on the religious backgrounds of the program’s faculty and of the college’s president. Edison O. Jackson, the president of Medgar Evers, is an ordained minister who serves on the ministerial staff of an African Methodist Episcopal church in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Faculty leaders, however, cited a range of perceived problems with the degree program as conceived by Medgar Evers. At a June 4 meeting of the trustees’ Committee on Academic Policy, Programs and Research, Lenore Beaky, vice chair of the systemwide University Faculty Senate and the senate’s representative on the board committee, read a statement from the senate’s executive committee that called the Medgar Evers proposal “seriously deficient in several important respects.”

One concern, Beaky said, was that “the proposal appears to promote the practice of religion to teach religion rather than to teach about religion.” The program, she added, “would be unconstitutional [because] as a public university we cannot violate the separation of church and state by favoring either religion or any particular variety of religion.”

The program, Beaky said, was “geared to … community experiences more suited to the practice of African-American protestant religions,” rather than the academic study of religion. She pointed to the religious affiliations of the college faculty who would teach in the program, as well the Christian affiliations of all of the scholars and others from whom Medgar Evers sought endorsements in its proposal.

Of the nine faculty members whose C.V.s are included with the proposal and who are to teach in the religious studies program, five focus their work on Christianity or African-American churches. Three others are scholars of philosophy and the fourth studies Islam in the black community.

The committee also criticized the affiliations of experts who wrote letters in support of the program that Medgar Evers officials cited in their proposal. Of the seven letters, four came from academics, all of whom focus on Christianity. Emilie M. Townes, a professor of African-American religion and theology at Yale University’s School of Divinity and president-elect of the American Academy of Religion, wrote that Medgar Evers was “an ideal place” for a religious studies major. Another letter came from Christine E. Gudorf, a professor at Florida International University and president of the Society of Christian Ethics, of which Darryl Trimiew, the chair of Medgar Evers’s department of philosophy and religion, is vice president. The third letter was from Marie A. Failinger, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church.

The fourth letter was from Barbara Austin-Lucas, a professor of religious education at Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, N.Y., run by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and president of Women Organizing, Mobilizing and Building, a faith-based aid group. Her son, Hakim Jabez Lucas, is a lecturer in philosophy and religion at Medgar Evers.

The other three letters came from community leaders, including the executive director of the local YMCA and Lonnie F. Oates, a minister of the Christian Church, who wrote that his church is “in great need for better educated church members and a preparatory program for our ministers.” He added: “A degree in religious studies would be a sound foundation for their preparation for Seminary…. Religious studies graduates would provide us with needed potential staff members and would of course be welcome in our churches for lay minister positions in education, evangelism and community development.”

Beaky also complained that students would also be required to do internships “requiring them to work closely with professionals, practitioners, and/or graduate professors in their field of choice in order to obtain hands-on experiences in the professional practices related to religious studies,” at least some at community and faith-based organizations. The proposal, Beaky added, confirmed that the program is “geared more toward the personal development of students — development as agents of change — rather than of their critical understanding of religions,” as would be expected of a liberal arts major in religion.

Manfred Philipp, chair of the University Faculty Senate and a chemistry professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, also criticized the program’s “sectarian” focus. At a public hearing on June 17, Philipp asked why there were no specific course offerings on Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and other Christian branches, while there were several courses on the religions of African-Americans and Caribbeans.

Phoenix, the college’s provost, responded by calling the groups Philipp listed as “sects” and suggesting that students could take independent study classes to learn about those groups. In an interview, she also proposed that students could do internships with those groups or research about them to fulfill the major’s requirements, adding that “the courses in the proposal are just the ones we’ll have at the beginning, but as the major grows, we’ll add more classes and more specific classes.”

Philipp also contends that the program offers several courses on “a specific brand of Christianity” — the Protestantism found in black churches — including a required upper-level course called “African Traditional Religions.” Students concentrating in philosophy and religion would also be required to take “Black Philosophical Thought” and students in the religion and social justice concentration would be required to take “Caribbean Religions and Social Justice Movements” and “The Role of the Church in the Black Community.” Other than a class on Buddhism and Hinduism required of the philosophy concentrators, all of the other required classes are surveys, such as “Peace Education,” “Religious Ethics” and “Philosophy of Religion.”

But Phoenix defended the religious studies major as “a way to explore how religion functions in and shapes the modern world.” It was not intended to be “an exhaustive look at every religion in the world — there’s no way we could cover them all,” she said, but rather a course of study focused on the “social science perspective” on modern religion.

“Our program is in no way trying to prepare students for seminary or sectarian studies, because that’s not what most of our students want,” Phoenix added, explaining that a survey of students interested in the religious studies major found that students were more likely to want to go to law school or to pursue non-profit or social service jobs than to go on to study divinity or become clergy members.

Jeremy Leaming, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said “the fact that some faculty say it may not be a very well-rounded program at the moment doesn’t amount to a violation of the separation of church and state.” Unless there is evidence that the program’s faculty are “trying to proselytize or inculcate Christianity or another religion,” he said, there are no grounds for objection to the religious studies program.

“Public universities,” Leaming added, “must ensure that religious study courses are just that, academic courses on religion, and not classes that should be taught at a bible seminary or a bible college.” He declined to comment further without more information on the program at Medgar Evers. -Jennifer Epstein

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Let me begin with a confession, my wife and I have an addiction. Or maybe it’s just the closest thing we have to a date night or family ritual. For the past several years, every Sunday evening from roughly 9pm on, we’ve done everything in our power to find ourselves parked on the couch or sitting up in bed, tuned in to HBO.

While the shows have changed, the writing and characters have remained troublingly endearing.

There have been sitcoms full of the seductions of celebrity culture, such as Sex and the City and it’s more recent male equivalent, the Mark Wahlberg-inspired Entourage.

In contrast, there have been a series of heavier, dare I say “darker,” series; including Carnival, The Station Agent, The Sopranos, Big Love, The Wire and the deliberate meditation on death, Six Feet Under, from which too many scenes to mention remain fixed in my imagination…

But as this summer approached I began to have pre-withdrawal symptoms. The Sopranos was coming to a final end - an end which would disappoint us all; and The Wire was not scheduled to return for at least another few months. This meant that I would have to be sustained through the summer heat by thirty minutes of the superficial Hollywood stylings of Vinny Chase and his motley crew. I’m ambivalently loyal at best to Big Love, but that’s a moot point since its recent move to Monday nights.

Do you feel my pain yet?

Anyway, much to my surprise, my cravings have been staved off by the newest arrival to HBO’s portfolio: enter John From Cincinnati, the story of a ghost town of a surfing community in Southern California. Never mind that my race politics continue to complain, “No Black People?” - it’s at least more plausible than the paucity of color in older shows set in New York City (i.e. Friends and Seinfeld).

Nonetheless, this show has it all.

“Great” Acting: Bruce Greenwood (Double Jeopardy et al) Rebecca DeMornay (continuing her work in The Lords of Doggtown), and two 90s sitcoms legends: Ed O’Neill (best known as Al Bundy) and 90210’s Luke Perry.

Painful Dialogue: Actually it’s more like juxtaposed monologues, full of phrases that are fragmented and incomplete, which quickly turn into enraged outbursts that produce emotional shutdowns on the part of their “victim.” These are truncated conversations in which it’s never quite clear that any shared meaning is achieved. This, in fact, is what brings the community of Imperial Beach together - their shared confusion amidst efforts to make sense of the mess of their lives. Thus far the show’s clearest human connection – where folks actually appear to be on the same page – is between trickster-figure John and surf-prodigy Shaunie Yost, in the form of a silent session of “scratch feet on ground and spin around” that produces mutual smiles. Maybe this a nod to Gospel stories of Jesus’ privileging child-like faith? Who knows, but here are a few of my favorite “religious” phrases thus far from the show’s namesake:

John- “the end is near,” “See God…” and “We are all frail vessels… Room 24 will give up its dead and the debt shall be forgiven.”

and one from Luke Perry’s Link- “Trust the devil you know, Mitch.”

Spirituality: there are resurrections, miraculous healings, ghosts, trances, visions and levitating bodies that will capture the attention of religious traditionalists, spiritual searchers and those just fascinated by “paranormal” occurrences.

Human Complexity: All of the deep questions, suffering, loss, death, dying dreams, community, family conflicts, and, of course, drugs, rock and roll and sex (strangely without gratuitous sex scenes). All without the aid of black and brown youth and their blasted rap music! Who knew?

A couple of closing thoughts: Set in Imperial Beach, CA - which I’m told is the first U.S. outpost north of Tijuana - Mexico is the shows constant “absent presence.” The show’s only non-white characters are either Spanish-speaking or speaking with Spanish accents, presumably of Mexican descent, and they show up as prisoners, gang-bangers and “illegals” shuffling just north of the border. The one recurring non-white character is the manager (played by Luis Guzman) of a motel with only one tenant - the squatting, drug-addicted surf legend, Butchie Yost. Between Butchie and the motel’s psychotic owner, poor Ramon’s day job is simply to clean up the shattered lives of broken white folks. While he is no “Magical Negro” - a character ubiquitious to the big screen (i.e. Will Smith in Bagger Vance, Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile, etc) making possible the salvation of “the man,” there is a clear family resemblance. The only magical person on this show is John (from Cincinnati?) , who arrives mysteriously from nowhere, produces cash from empty pockets that always corresponds to the dollar amount requested of him, carries a platinum credit card incapable of being maxed out, and enables others to performer miraculous healings.

A Few Questions

While the show’s driving “religious” metaphor is clearly a new age spirituality of the surf, does John represent a subtle endorsement of the popular prosperity gospel? Or perhaps the writers are aware of the historical overlap in the United States between these two traditions?Does the show’s disjointed, never resolved dialogue denote a nod to a postmodern spirituality that accents fissures and breaks and takes a nod from Rilke’s word’s to the young poet, “love the questions…” - community of seeker-surfers?

Must focusing upon spirituality (i.e. John) require a denial or downplaying of politics (i.e. U.S. immigration policy)? Must they be mutually exclusive? Must spirituality, as a contrast to both the religious right and left, be so deeply personal at the expense of emptying out any political consciousness? Or maybe the writers mean to critique the blind-spots of white privilege that shape the largely self-absorbed concerns of the show’s central figures, almost all of whom find it difficult to step out beyond their individual agendas.

These are just a few preliminary thoughts on a great new show. I know there must be some book out there on surfing as a metaphor for life, but for now I have refrained from researching it, content simply to ride the wave of my new HBO fix. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Official HBO Site: www.hbo.com/johnfromcincinnati/

Fan Site: home.earthlink.net/~mypix2007/jfc/index.html

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Hello Everyone!

Thanks once again for the generosity of feedback in the week leading up to the launch - the love is much appreciated.

By now perhaps you a have a theory; if not, hopefully you’ve at least asked yourself: “Why did this brother choose to launch his site on 07.07.07?” Well, since you ask, indulge me for a moment…

Whether it’s the poetic appeal – never mind if you’re a biblical literalist or Darwinian by design – of the earth being spoken into existence in six days followed by one of divine rest…

Or you’ve been out on those corners praying for that lucky roll of the die,

Whether you were listening to Minister Farrakhan move the crowd at the Mall in 1995 when he started laying down those numbers…

Or you’re a gospel music loyalist waxing nostalgic of Fred Hammond - before he
signaled the move of black churches to praise and worship music - on his second to last
album with Commissioned (circa 1991),

Whether you witnessed pre-break up Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 name their first born…

Or you’ve had to fight the itch of that long seventh inning stretch in your marriage,

There’s just something about that Number – a near universal appeal that appears to be attributed to the number seven.

Now, I’m no numerologist, but it was still all too difficult for me resist the resounding resonance with which the number seven seems to be celebrated. And just in case none of the examples in my above litany sold you, let me share, more personally, just a few reasons why I chose to launch my site on this the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new millennium.

First of all, I am nearing the start of my seventh and hopefully final year (pray with me!) of what has been an extremely rewarding time of doctoral studies at Harvard University. They say seven years is average at Harvard… so call me average!

Second, seven is a number that many religious traditions treat as significant – just check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number) – so this choice also reflects the fact that religion and spirituality, in all their diverse manifestations, take a primary place in both my personal biography and intellectual journey.

And third, it has also been seven months since the passing of my mother, Patricia Ann Wallace, and amongst other things this site has afforded me the opportunity to memorialize her life on the web and to acknowledge the tremendous wealth of her spirit, to which I am an heir. Check out the page dedicated to her (www.josefsorett.com/patricia-ann-wallace-tribute/) on this site to learn more about this remarkable woman. We miss her dearly!

At the church I grew up attending, seven was believed to be the number of completion – and thus of new beginnings as well. In a year that promises us all a host of new beginnings – as well as important endings – I am excited to start this on-line dialogue.

Staying steady with the number seven, I’ve decided to define my launch into the blogosphere by an initial series of seven blog entries. Don’t worry, not all at once.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect from posts in the days and weeks to come:

Today: Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction

Coming Soon:
Towards the (Post) Hip Hop Intellectual
Race, Religion and Politics in the City University of New York
“I Ain’t Here to Argue About His Facial Features…”
Left, Left, Left, Right, Left: Culture Politics, Policy and the Poles of Public Morality
The Art of My Eclectic (Personal) Fashion Sensibility
Muhammad Walks an Underground Freeway to the Club

Before I get to the first post, I want to quickly acknowledge one of my closest friends, who also happens to be my personal technology consultant: Joselin Mane. If you like what you see on this site, check out www.litbel.com for the best techie I know (website design, hosting services, etc.). While academic trends of late have highlighted the history of intersecting afro-latina/o diasporas (See: Future of Black Studies), this site has been an exercise in building black & Latina/o partnerships. In the process of learning to work this website, Joselin claims that he has been teaching me to fish… bacalao, I guess? If you can’t swing the cod fish, then try some Platanos and Collard Greens.   Either way, Mucho Amor a mi hermano dominicano de otra madre!

Okay, enough with the self-less plug. It’s now official, www.josefsorett.com has been launched. And while it’s surely anti-climactic at this point, check out my first blog entry, Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction, which will post at 7am.

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