Cultural Significations and Black Religion

3 credits · Divinity School

This course focuses on the origins and varieties of religious experience, scriptural interpretations, ritual practices, mythical narratives, symbolic representations, cultural artifacts, vernacular folk traditions, sociopolitical ideologies, and power dynamics that historically have been subsumed under the heavy-laden concept of Black religion.Utilizing the work of pioneering historian of religion Charles H. Long, considerable attention will be paid to the process of signifying as a system of general theorizing about the ways in which human beings communicate, seek, and negotiate meaning and social power in both the sacred and secular spheres. Through an interdisciplinary examination of sources drawn from across the African diaspora, this course will emphasize the study of religion in the modern world as both a mode of orientation as well as a process of meaning-making, but with the description and critical analysis of Black religious phenomena, the complex matrix of sights, sounds, movements, and other sensory stimuli, in contradistinction to the invisibility and invalidation imposed upon subjugated peoples around the world by normative Western discourses. [3] Mr. Floyd-Thomas