Since my purpose in visiting London was to conduct research, it only seems reasonable that I offer a blog post about the city’s libraries. I spent time at only a fraction of them. There’s probably well over a half dozen libraries that I could have made use of if I had had more time. But, because I was in the city for only two weeks of archival research, I focused my time on two places, the...
After I left Oxford, I spent the weekend in Prague. Like my time in Oxford, the trip was primarily work related. I was there visiting the Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her show at FotoFest 2022 will be held at First Houston. My father and I are curating it and the objective of the visit was to work with her to make the final selection of images for the exhibition. I think it is going to...
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...