I’m excited to announce that, with Sade Perkins, I’ll be a Crossroads Project Fellow for 2022-2023 for a project we’re doing on “Religion in Houston’s Pan-African Community.” We’ll be facilitating a series of public conversations and oral histories with community elders about the relationship between their justice work and religious beliefs and spiritual...
This Saturday I’ll be presenting a paper at the AAR on “The Universal Black Men Catechism: The African Orthodox Church and Marcus Garvey’s Populism” as part of a panel on “A Century of African Orthodoxy: Exploring Racism, Blackness, and Religious Identity” organized by the Afro-American Religious History and Eastern Orthodox Studies Units. The panel commemorates the...
Next Monday, November 16th, at 6:30 p.m. Central, I will be giving an online lecture at Rice University on “Varieties of Populism in the United States.”
Last December Mark Lilla published an article in the New York Review of Books titled “Two Roads for the New French Right.” It discusses intellectual currents in French amongst the Right, specifically amongst people about my age or younger. According to Lilla, they represent something new. They are more concerned with climate change and more critical of capitalism than their elders. Some of them...
As part of my research for the Minns Lectures on American Populism and Unitarian Universalism I recently stumbled across the following description of Unitarianism by the Rev. Ethelred Brown in Langston Hughes’s column “Week by Week,” which Hughes wrote regularly for the Chicago Defender. This was published in 1960, about four years after Brown died. I am not certain when Brown...
I will be presenting a paper entitled “Unitarian Universalism and the White Supremacist Theoligical Imaginary” at the 2017 meeting of Collegium. Here’s the text of the accepted paper proposal: This exercise in comparative theology will contrast the white supremacist theological imaginary with the theological imaginaries of two Unitarian Universalism’s foundational figures:...
I found this gem by Covington Hall today while reading through the old IWW newspaper The Lumberjack. It’s from the January 9, 1913 edition: The politician is my shepherd, I shall not want anything during any campaign. He leadeth me into the saloon for my vote’s sake. He filleth my pocket with good cigars; my cup of beer runneth over. He inquireth concerning my family, even unto the...
I am presenting a paper today, June 9, at the How Class Works conference at the State University of New York Stony Brook titled “To Grow Our Souls: Grace Lee Boggs’s Conceptions of Class.” The paper will hopefully soon be turned into a journal article. In the meantime, here’s the description I submitted to the conference organizers: I examine how the philosopher and social...
Last month at the annual conference of the French Association of American Studies I met people from the Yale’s Cultural Studies Laboratory. Its official title is the Working Group on Globalization and Culture. It is run by Michael Denning. The lab is modeled after the now defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, where Denning did a master’s degree. As a...
I spent much of last week in Toulouse, France at the annual conference of the French Association of American Studies. I was there to present a synopsis of my dissertation and participate in the graduate student seminar that proceeded the conference proper. Along the way I learned a bit about the differences between American and French approaches to American Studies. Most of these stem, I suspect...