Passionately human, no less divine : religion and culture in black chicago, 1915-1952 /

The Great Migration was the most significant event in black life since emancipation and Reconstruction. Passionately Human, No Less Divine analyzes the various ways black southerners transformed African American religion in Chicago during their Great Migration northward. A work of religious, urban,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Best, Wallace D.
Corporate Authors: De Gruyter.
Published: Princeton University Press,
Publisher Address: Princeton, N.J. :
Publication Dates: [2007]
©2007
Literature type: eBook
Language: English
Subjects:
Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400849345
http://www.degruyter.com/doc/cover/9781400849345.jpg
Summary: The Great Migration was the most significant event in black life since emancipation and Reconstruction. Passionately Human, No Less Divine analyzes the various ways black southerners transformed African American religion in Chicago during their Great Migration northward. A work of religious, urban, and social history, it is the first book-length analysis of the new religious practices and traditions in Chicago that were stimulated by migration and urbanization. The book illustrates how the migration launched a new sacred order among blacks in the city that reflected aspects of both Southern black religion and modern city life. This new sacred order was also largely female as African American women constituted more than 70 percent of the membership in most black Protestant churches. Ultimately, Wallace Best demonstrates how black southerners imparted a folk religious sensibility to Chicago's black churches. In doing so, they ironically recast conceptions of modern, urban African American religion in terms that signified the rural past. In the same way that working class cultural idioms such as jazz and the blues emerged in the secular arena as a means to represent black modernity, he says, African American religion in Chicago, with its negotiation between the past, the present, rural and urban, revealed African American religion in modern form.
Carrier Form: 1 online resource(272pages) : illustrations
ISBN: 9781400849345
Index Number: BR563
CLC: B928.712
Contents: Frontmatter --
Contents --
Abbreviations --
Figures --
Tables --
Preface --
Acknowledgments --
Introduction --
Chapter One. "Mecca of the Migrant Mob" --
Chapter Two. The South in the City --
Chapter Three. Southern Migrants and the New Sacred Order --
Chapter Four. The Frenzy, the Preacher, and the Music --
Chapter Five. The Chicago African Methodist Episcopal Church in Crisis --
Chapter Six. A Woman s Work, or Urban World --
Epilogue --
Notes --
Index.