Between Faith and History: Thinking About African American Religious History as an Interdisciplinary Field

Last updated on: August 7, 2014 at 2:51 pm by Guest Contributor

Between Faith and History: Thinking About African American Religious History as an Interdisciplinary Field 2014-08-07T14:51:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Christopher Bonner asked an excellent question in his recent post, “What can we truly know about men and women who were self-consciously making history?” Certainly, scholars do argue that past people of color did self-consciously make history. However, this is not an obvious conclusion as demonstrated by debates concerning the consequences of Christian conversion for Africans and their descendents throughout the Black Diaspora. Recent work from an array of excellent scholars in a variety of academic disciplines presents different approaches and answers to Bonner’s question. Yet, much of this work, whether it emphasizes philosophical inquiry, historical narrative, anthropological description, or theological critique, suggests that writing the history of Afro-American religion and theology requires continued and new exchange between historians, theologians, and religious studies scholars [1]. I’ve encountered a problem while teaching African American religion that also arises within scholarship and that highlights the need for continued interdisciplinary work.

The difficulty arises from teaching African American religion and theology as a professional historian in the interdisciplinary curriculum of religious studies. I want my students to develop an historical empathy. A colleague of mine calls this a critical empathy for the motivations and insights of historical people. By providing students with rich contextual descriptions of the past, I hope that they might begin to step beyond their personal experiences to occupy previous perspectives that might seem unthinkable within contemporary worldviews. I also teach students to historicize religious and intellectual concepts like faith.

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