Baldblogger Interviews Edward J. Blum, Part 6

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With the first week of classes at many colleges and schools this week, it is only appropriate that the conversation shift to teaching. Not only does Blum's work chart new historiographical territory, it also promises to refashion the pedagogical landscape. Feel free to share your own thoughts on teaching Du Bois or related topics; think of it as an on-line inservice.

Baldblogger (BB): I’d like to shift the discussion from research to teaching. Some may or may not know that you won a teaching award as a graduate student, and your recent profile on History News Network commented about pedagogy. Can you discuss your teaching philosophy? How important is the relationship between a scholar’s research/writing and his/her teaching? Why?

Ed Blum (EB): I see very little different between my teaching and my research. I teach what I research; I research what I teach. I find that students love it in discussions of the reading for a week what I have found in the archives, or what my reading of primary documents says about a topic. For example, when I teach about the nineteenth century, my students find it fascinating that by 1900 there were whites in America who claimed that African Americans did not have “souls.” And then when I remind them about Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk you can see a collective ‘ohhh’ moment in the class. That is exhilarating. Also, I feel that if I can articulate my ideas to an undergraduate class, then I can write it for other historians. So I see very little divide between teaching and research.

My teaching philosophy is built around the imagination. I want my students to be able to imagine the past – how it felt, how it smelled, how it looked, what they would have thought. And this process of imagination becomes really complicated when they try to put themselves in the positions of very different people. How did the slave market look to a buyer? How did it look to a slave? How about to a poor white woman outside of New Orleans? Getting students to feel the time and the conflict, that is what is most important to me. For this reason, I use a whole mess of approaches. We use music; we’ll have food; we have debates and historical simulations. I often have my students find their own primary documents (so they go and find any responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and see what they think). That’s the fun stuff to me.

The best historical simulation we do is of an abolitionist convention. Students research different abolitionists (like William Lloyd Garrison, the Tappan brothers, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydia Maria Child, Sojourner Truth, etc) and then come to class to form a new organization. At first, everyone agrees about the basics (that slavery is bad; that the South is a problem). But then things get messy. Usually it involves issues of gender – and those who worked on Stanton get infuriated that there is not more attention to women’s rights. Then the issue of violence comes up and no one can agree on anything. By the end, the group is usually ready to divide along various lines, which is pretty much what happened over and over again. The lesson: being a reformer is hard.

BB: Can you provide 1 or 2 examples of this relationship from your own teaching career?

EB: My best experience with students thus far was with two undergraduates at Kean University. For one summer, I had two research assistants – Katherine Kennedy and Danielle LaPorte. We would trek over to Rutgers University, sit down at our respective microfilm machines, and look at everything Du Bois. It was a blast talking with them about what they were finding. They read a few biographies of Du Bois and then printed out anything they found interesting from The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that he edited from 1910 to 1934. Watching them “do history” was just so much fun. Their research was so helpful for my book as well.

BB: You are a member of what cultural commentators Generation X (as am I), and while the technological dimensions of our childhood weren’t filled with cell phones and iPods but VCRs, CDs, and slow bulky PCs without and Internet connection (!) education specialists seem to talk incessantly about today’s visual generation—and the importance of visual literacy. Yet other specialists insist that pedagogical processes must also include more “traditional” forms of teaching. In light of these generational dynamics and pedagogical concerns what are some of the most effective strategies for teaching history? Why?

EB: I’m not against the use of technology – of videos or of music in the classroom. If they could make historical video games I would probably use them. So in that sense I’m definitely a part of Generation X. But I also love a good lecture; there are some lecturers – like Leon Litwack or Mark W. Summers – who can hold a crowd spellbound. They don’t need fancy technology; they just have great historical yarns, jokes, and stories that illuminate an era. I guess I try to do both.

BB: How do you teach Du Bois? Did writing W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet prompt you to revise how you teach him in any significant way(s)?

EB: When I teach about Du Bois, it is always in the context of other topics, such as slavery or Reconstruction, or white supremacist theology, or the Civil Rights Movement. I typically use Du Bois as an example of the various ways that African Americans resisted oppression. Or I discuss him as an example of how white supremacy affects everything. When Du Bois received his PhD, he was one of the most highly educated and accomplished young academics in the United States; and yet no white university would hire him. Students tend to find that interesting. It is a part of racism that is less abhorrent than something like lynching, but seems to get students where they are at--potential job applicants.

BB: In your experience, how have students responded to Du Bois?

EB: Students have a tough time reading and relating to Du Bois, I have found. They find his prose, especially The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater to be too Victorian. They often don’t get his allusions – whether to ancient mythologies or Shakespeare. But they do tend to get his religious allusions better than many academics. My students can usually identify that something “comes from the Bible” – they just usually don’t know where.

BB: What are some of the key Du Bois works with which students may begin to engage this important historical thinker?

It depends on what the class is for. If it is an African American history class, then the best work to read of Du Bois’s is Darkwater. It has him at his best and most critical in many ways. If the class is on religion, then his Prayers for Dark People will be lots of fun (and affordable). If the class is on gender and race, then his novel Dark Princess could be very interesting, because it has a messianic union between an African American and an Indian Princess. For a basic US history class, sections of Black Reconstruction are just fantastic, particularly the end about the “propaganda of history.” For world history classes, one could use The World and Africa which was a fantastic primer on world and African history.

[Photo from UMass-Amherst Digital Du Bois archive.]

Who is Your Teacher?

Here at Baldblogging I devoted much of the time this summer to W.E.B. Du Bois, so why not begin the semster and school year with the Professor? I offer prayers for both students and faculty from Prayers for Dark People, a collection of Du Bois's spiritual petitions written for students at Atlanta University around 1909-10. (Posted here also.)

"Let us remember, O God, that our religion in life is expressed in our work, and therefore in this school [Atlanta University] it is shown in the way we conquer our studies—not entirely in our marks but in the honesty of our endeavour, the thoroughness of our accomplishment and the singleness and purity of our purpose. In school life there is but one unforgivable sin and that is to know how to study and to be able to study, and then to waste and throw away God’s time and opportunity. From this blasphemy deliver us all, O God. Amen” (p. 33).

"God bless all schools and forward the great work of education for which we stand. Arouse within us and within our land a deep realization of the seriousness of our problem of training children. On them rests the future work and throught and sentiment and goodness of the world. If here and elsewhere we train the lazy and shallow, the self-indulgent and the frivolous--if we destroy reason and religion and do not rebuild, help us, O God, to realize how heavy is our responsibility and how great the cost. The school of today is the world of tomorrow and today and tomorrow are Thine, O God. Amen (I Samuel 16:6-12)" (p. 53).

Best wishes for a productive and successful semester and year!

[Photo from UMass-Amherst Digital Archive.]

Religion and Politics: A History, Part 2

As hoped from a previous post, the folks at Get Religion and Religion in American History commented about the recent special that discussed Billy Graham and his relationship to the White House. Read here and here to join the conversation.

And speaking of religion and politics, the fine radio program Speaking of Faith recently did a show on Aimee Semple McPherson, whose conservative politics historian Matthew Avery Sutton fascinatingly details in his new book. (HT: Paul Harvey/Art Remillard)

Baldblogger Interviews Edward J. Blum, Part 5

Today's segment from my interview with Ed Blum--along with subsequent segments--moves into more of the history behind his Du Bois book, teaching, and where and how Du Bois can fit into pedagogy.

Baldblogger (BB): Can you discuss a bit of the history of writing W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet, in short the evolution of this project? When did you start? How long did it take? To what archives did you travel? Did you travel to Ghana at all during the course of this book?

Ed Blum (EB): W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet began on the plane from Lexington, Kentucky, to Boston, Massachusetts, in the fall of 2002. I was heading to the Harvard Divinity School for a job interview and I knew that they would want to know what the next project was. At the time, I was about 2/3 of the way through my dissertation and had a list of 20 “next” projects (things like a biography of Dwight Moody or a study of religion and the abolitionist movement). But none of those felt right – and I was thinking in terms of what folks at Harvard would want to hear. So I came up with a religious biography of Du Bois, since his connection to Harvard was so important. I knew that David Lewis had won the Pulitzer Prize for his first biography of Du Bois and I knew that Lewis did not take religion seriously in it. During my interview, the good people of the divinity school seemed very excited about the project (this was proof to me that it was worthwhile). So as I finished the dissertation I started reading everything Du Bois, which is a lot.

I spent the first several years just reading everything that Du Bois published and that was published about him. Sadly, I don’t think anyone could ever read everything published about Du Bois--there is a ton of it. This early work didn’t take me to any archives, but it did bring me to a lot of out-of-print books. I have found that librarians, particularly interlibrary loan libraries, are crucial for researching historians. I would click on this book or that pamphlet and low and behold two weeks later it would arrive. Some of the stuff I found was fascinating. An MA thesis from an African American scholar who had met Du Bois and decided to write a poem about him; the eulogy that Reverend William Howard Melish gave in Africa in 1963; a copy of The Souls of Black Folk with extra poems written on the sides.

In 2005 I hit Du Bois’s personal papers, which are on microfilm, at Rutgers University. This was done in tandem with two research assistants – Danielle LaPorte and Katherine Kennedy. They read through 30 years of The Crisis, the national organ for the NAACP, while I combed through Du Bois’s personal writings. Personal papers are a hoot. You find all types of crazy things. I remember when working on my dissertation I went to New Haven to search through the Dwight Moody papers and I found all of these sermon outlines; they were literally a dozen words from which Moody would give his sermon. Sometimes, I could match the sermon later printed in the newspaper with the outline. That was cool. Only once did I ever have the hankering to take something from an archive and that is when I found Confederate money in a minister’s papers at Princeton. I don’t know why, but the devil inside said ‘oh no one will care if it’s missing.’ Of course, that’s no reason to steal. And, what the hell did I really want with Confederate money anyway?

I did not travel to Ghana, sadly, in part because of time, in part because of finances. I imagine that another scholar will find a treasure trove of materials there relating to responses to Du Bois at the end of his life. My bet would be they will find more spiritual reflections about his life and times.

So I worked on Du Bois non stop from 2002 to 2007. My dissertation research, which was from 1999 to 2002, informed a good deal of the study as well. One thing I didn’t do, which David Lewis and others have done, is interview those who knew Du Bois. There are lots of reasons that I did not, but the main one is that I wanted to know how people understood Du Bois in his historical moments, and I found plenty of material on that from the eras of his life.

BB: For interested readers unable travel to archives, what are some of the best on-line sources/resources if one wishes to study about Du Bois and read his work?

EB: The best place to find online resources about Du Bois is at the library webpage of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There, one can find a ton of stuff, including digitized photos of Du Bois, his friends, family, and other material. They also have a ton of digitized articles and books from him.

[BB: other on-line resources include The W.E.B. Du Bois Virtual University, Professor Robert Williams's fabulous repository of Du Bois resources, the resources page at the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass-Amherst, Dr. Steven Hale's Du Bois on-line selections, resources from the Documenting the American South project, the Perspectives in American Literature (PAL) page, the reading room at Harvard's Du Bois Institute, documents from the FBI files of Du Bois (though redacted), Du Bois's New York Times featured author page (subscription required), the e-project at the University of Virginia Library (scroll down for Du Bois), and in other various places Paul Harvey points out.]

NEW: I meant to post this initially, but forgot. Richard Rath, a historian who does sensory history among other things, teaches at the U. of Hawaii and with some students developed a kind of soundtrack to Souls of Black Folk. It is amazingly cool, and a helpful resource in teaching. Check it out here and let us know what you think.

[Photo from UMass-Amherst Digitial Du Bois]

Baldblogger Interviews Edward J. Blum, Part 4

Baldblogger (BB): You devote a whole chapter to Du Bois’s masterful Souls of Black Folk. Briefly, why does this book deserve its own chapter?

Ed Blum (EB:) Souls of Black Folk is such an important work for a variety of reasons. First, it is with that work that Du Bois established himself as a public intellectual. That was the book that catapulted him from a fine scholar to an internationally-renowned scholar. It was reviewed in newspapers and journals throughout the United States and Great Britain, and I found that it had a huge readership. In the hundred years since its publication in 1903, moreover, the book has continued to be read and thought about. [BB: for more on this point, see this book.] Much of my book focuses on how people read and understood Du Bois – so this was a great work for that. It is also the place where Du Bois pioneered a new type of scholarly writing – an interdisciplinary approach, where he mixed history, sociology, personal reflections, poetry, music, and anthropology. Finally, Souls of Black Folk was a perfect example of how scholars had missed the boat by ignoring religion. The title, particularly the word souls, was crucial. It seemed evident that Du Bois was trying to write about something deeper than just lived reality; he wanted to write about the souls of African Americans, the parts of them that could connect with the divine. And this title stood in direct opposition to white supremacist arguments of the time that black people did not have souls.

BB: In chapter 3 (and Reforging) you answer your own call to examine the religious dimensions of the construction of whiteness. In this chapter you show how Du Bois understood white supremacy in theological terms, and where and why this theology had dire economic consequences. You also make a key point here about Du Bois’s relationship to Marxism, since by definition orthodox Marxism has no room for religion. I wonder if you could elaborate on this point, or perhaps connect this question to the question below about chapter 4?

EB: Du Bois was certainly influenced by Karl Marx in the early twentieth century. He was also deeply moved by the Communist experiments in the Soviet Union and China. This has often been used to suggest that Du Bois was anti-religious, as much of the Communist experiments were. But Du Bois was never a dogmatic reader. He did not follow everything that Marx or Lenin or Mao wrote. Du Bois took from them what he thought applicable and left what he found incidental. For instance, Marx’s comments about religion are not really central to his political aims. What Du Bois wanted was an organized economy. He wanted the best and brightest minds to come together and plan the economy – so that if people were starving, they could be sent food; if people were homeless, they could be built homes; if people needed jobs, they could found. This is what socialism meant to Du Bois. The question, then, becomes from where does this spirit of change come. Du Bois had no problem arguing that a true interpretation of religion and Christianity would lead people to this kind of political economy. So Du Bois was a religious socialist, and this was very common in the United States.

On the issue of whiteness, I think it is critical that we recognize, as Du Bois did, the importance of religious ideas for it. Being “white” in the United States is more than just having greater access to wealth or more opportunities in education; it is a subtle, psychological connection to the sacred, to God. There is a reason that Jesus and the biblical heroes are almost always depicted as white in American culture. Heck, even Simon the Cyrene is not black in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. [BB: Read this book and this commentary for works that address, to some extent, race and Gibson's movie, and watch this for a direct challenge to a white, European Jesus. See my brief reflections about Color of the Cross here and here. Also relevant is Callahan's The Talking Book. See my thoughts here. Finally, check this out.] By associating whiteness with godliness, American society can accept slavery, segregation, high incarceration rates of African Americans, etc. For Du Bois, the only way we could overcome this connection was to first be aware of it and then chose to dismantle it. That is why I write so much about the connection between whiteness and godliness.

BB: In your chapter on literature, violence, and redemption (ch. 4), you intriguingly explore Du Bois’s literary productions and the deft ways he dramatizes violence using religious categories. In these stories Du Bois’s reverses the status quo of the time and therefore seemingly reflects a kind of redemptive hope. On this account, what are 2 or 3 of Du Bois’s most important creative, literary works and why?

EB: The best place to start for Du Bois’s stories of violence and religion would be in Darkwater. There, he has a short story entitled “Jesus Christ in Texas.” It’s just marvelous. Basically, it asks what would happen if a Jewish Jesus showed up in 1915 in Waco, Texas. Also in Darkwater there are some poems that are great to read: “A Litany at Atlanta” is powerful and so is “The Gospel According to Mary Brown.” [BB: See also the powerful "The Souls of White Folk."] Only the truly committed should delve into Du Bois’s novels. They can be a little boring at times.

BB: To what extent are these creative writings applicable, or instructive, for contemporary American society? In your experience, do students seem to make these sorts of connections?

EB: Du Bois always depicted issues of race and racism, international warfare and imperialism, and material greed and graft as moral issues. He saw religion as intimately connected to discrimination, to national wars, and to business abuses. Basically, Du Bois claimed that the religion of a people either impels it to justice or away from it. His attacks upon imperialism, for example, could be heard today in terms of the war in Iraq. This is the reason I began the book with this prayer from him: “Give us in our day, O God, to see the fulfillment of Thy vision of Peace. May these young people grow to despise false ideals of conquest and empire and all the tinsel of war. May we strive to replace force with justice and armies of murder with armies of relief. May we believe in Peace among all nations as a present practical creed and count love for our country as love and not hate for our fellow men. Amen.”

My students very easily make the connections between what Du Bois said then and what we live in now. They see the link between past white claims that African Americans did not have souls with the current focus on white children when they are kidnapped (and the lack of attention to black children). They also see how materialism – buying more and more stuff – does not fuel one spiritually, a point that Du Bois made over and over again.

BB: From your discussion of Du Bois’s relationship to Communism (ch. 5), in many ways he appears more religious in the later years of his life, particularly leading up to his move to Ghana and after he became a member of the Party. Why is this the case?

EB: The conventional wisdom on Du Bois is that in his later years he really abandoned religion. But if you read any of his poems, any of his political speeches, or his final autobiography, it appears evident that religious ideas were on his mind just about all the time. I think, in part, he was responding to the hyper-Christian nationalism that emerged after WWII in the United States that painted everything American as godly and everything socialistic as evil. Du Bois tried to fight fire with fire, but he was certainly in the minority. This should not, however, make us see him as antireligious. He was anti the particular brand of American religion after WWII, the kind that wrapped itself in the American flag, in McCarthyism, in militancy, and in materialism.

[Photo from UMass Digital Archive; Du Bois in Moscow, ca. 1958)

Politics and Religion: A History

In my hometown newspaper, just read in the religion section about a documentary scheduled to air next Friday on ABC: "Pastor to Power: Billy Graham and the Presidents." It appears based on the new book by Time writers Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy titled The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House.


No doubt it'll be an interesting show, though Randall Balmer's documentary on Graham is a good one. Wonder what Rice University sociologist William Martin has to say, since he has one of the most important biographies on Graham. Surely the folks at Get Religion will offer their insights on the show, as I hope will the contributors to Religion in American History.

Teaching: The Art of Learning

Just about to finish up teaching my first upper-level undergraduate course: American Religious History. Given that American religion is my primary area of training in my doctoral work, this class has been loads of fun to teach, and made more enjoyable with discussion-oriented students. It is a small class, so the dynamics are certainly different than if there were, say, 40-50 students. Unfortunately, as a summer school class everything seems shorter.

In prepping for lectures, and, in general, conducting research for teaching, I want to offer thoughts on several resources, and throw it open for discussion.

I opted for a thematic approach overall, focusing mainly on the variety of religious experiences in America's past (students read Robert Orsi the first week, for instance), while the course moved chronologically. I assigned Patrick Allitt's reader, Stout's biography on Whitefield, the much-loved Kingdom of Matthias, and one of my favorite books, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. For general background to the course I also assigned Buter, Wacker, Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History. In addition, two Du Bois essays came from this volume, and I assigned a few documents from Harvey and Goff's excellent reader on contemporary American religion.

Having recently read Stephen Prothero's newest book on religious literacy, and being more or less convinced of his arguments, I set out to (unscientifically) test his thesis by giving my students the first night of class his suggested religious literacy quiz. Students seemed to know more than I expected, but some of the things I thought they'd know they didn't. It was an interesting exercise, and prompted much fruitful discussion. Before taking the quiz, I had students read his Christian Science Monitor essay and then I spoke briefly about the book.

In prepping for my lecture on Islam in American religion (focusing mainly on the 18th and 19th centuries), I found several chapters in Michael Gomez's amazing Black Crescent absolutely indispensable. Gomez has done an amazing amount of archival work here, and it is a must read if you want to make key transatlantic connections for classes that deal with American or Atlantic history.

Since the class was two nights per week and went from 6-10, I broke the class up between lecture, discussion, and some form of media--either music, movie clips, or documentary segments. I showed clips from the movie Glory and Gods and Generals to highlight black and white religion during particular moments of the 19th century, for example, as well as scenes depicting Malcolm X's religious conversion from Spike Lee's important joint, while I showed segments from the new documentaries Sister Aimee, The Mormons (read more about it here) and Jonestown. I was slightly over a year old when Jonestown happened, so for those of you who have seen this documentary and remember how this event was reported at the time, feel free to offer comparisons for us in the comments. How many people know, apparently, that Jim Jones began his public career preaching racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s, and, according to the documentary, he and his wife were the first people to adopt interracial in the state of Indiana? Interesting.

I also showed several chapters from Briars in the Cottonpatch: The Story of Koinonia Farm, which prompted significant discussion. I wanted to get to the new film about the most famous hippie-for-Jesus you've never heard of, but really didn't have time. Each of these resources provided for great discussion.

In addition to students turning and presenting briefly their research papers, we will discuss megachurches and other dimensions of contemporary American religion in the final class meeting.

Feel free to chime in, and offer your own thoughts or resources on/for teaching American religious history.

Baldblogger Interviews Edward J. Blum, Part 3

Today's interview topic is autobiography and constructing the self; next time Blum answers questions on the other chapters of his book.

Baldblogger (BB): Looking back on ch. 1, in which you chart Du Bois’s construction of his autobiographical selves, what strikes you the most about the ways Du Bois imagined himself and presented himself to the world?

Ed Blum (EB): Let me first say that chapter one on Du Bois’s many autobiographies was inspired, in part, by Patricia Schechter’s book on Ida B. Wells and by Louis DeCaro’s work on Malcolm X (and here and here). Both of them, along with many other scholars, started to read autobiographies not just to find the facts about someone’s life but also to determine how the individual conceived of his or her existence. What did they want most remembered? What did they want forgotten (and hence not mentioned)? Du Bois was a perfect person for this type of analysis because he wrote several autobiographies. His first, and perhaps best, was in Darkwater (1920); his last was published after his death. What I found with Du Bois was that over and over and over he talked about his religious and spiritual influences. Even in his final autobiography, he claimed to have never lost a spiritual side. And, to be blunt, I found that David Levering Lewis quoted from Du Bois’s final autobiography disingenuously. Lewis shortened a passage that Du Bois clearly intended to be taken as evidence of his religiosity so that it reads as if Du Bois was irreligious. You can check that out in the final chapter of my book.

The most important ways Du Bois projected his life are as emblem of race in America and as prophetic figure. He wanted his life narrative, on one hand, to speak about racial issues in the United States – whether interracial sexuality, education, job discrimination, etc. He also presented himself as a prophetic figure in these accounts, oftentimes showing that he wanted to be thought of as one who could speak cosmic realities to the world.

BB: In what ways would Du Bois recognize himself in your work? Why or why not? Has David Graham Du Bois (W.E.B. Du Bois’s son) communicated with you after reading your book?

EB: Sometimes, I think Du Bois would have thought it strange that a religious biography of him exists. Perhaps he would have feared being appropriated by those who are religiously dogmatic and would want to use him to defend religious beliefs that he did not hold. For example, it seems pretty clear that Du Bois did not consider belief in Jesus Christ the only means to heaven. But then again, Du Bois never complained when others regarded him as a spiritual figure. In fact, he was usually the one who published such regards. When William Howard Melish said that he was like Elijah, Du Bois published that in an autobiography; when Horace Bumstead said that Du Bois had a pure kind of religion, again it made its way into the autobiography. So I think Du Bois would have seen a lot of himself in here.

I have never communicated with David Graham Du Bois, and sadly he died in 2005. I was hoping that he would read the work and let me know. Another person who would have had deep insight into my book is Herbert Aptheker, but he too is gone.

BB: For those unfamiliar with Du Bois’s autobiographical publications, where’s a good place to start? Why?

EB: The best place to start for Du Bois’s autobiographies is to get a copy of Darkwater; it was originally published in 1920, but there are plenty of good editions out now that are cheap. Then, if you really get into Du Bois, check out his 1940 work Dusk of Dawn. It is part autobiography, part plan for an all-black socialism. And it is there that Du Bois creates a distinction between the true Christian and the white American that will blow your mind. And as always, you can read about that in depth in W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet.

"Blum(ing)" Around with W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet, Part 4

Ch. 5
Blum’s final chapter, “Christ Was a Communist,” chronicles the closing decades of Du Bois’s life, as he traveled widely throughout the world, forged key relationships among the globe’s communists, spent a considerable amount of his public reflection on Africa, and as is well known finally joined the Communist Party. Importantly, Du Bois remained steadfastly religious, presented himself as such in his final autobiographical installment along with a vast array of other publications, and both Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson still described Du Bois as a prophet in the 1950s.

Blum argues that Du Bois’s critical reflection on church and missionary collusion with colonialism, notably in his work Color and Democracy (1945), is not evidence of his irreligion, but is actually consistent with his understanding of white supremacy in theological categories and his fervent hope for redemption through various social means. Moreover, Blum documents several of Du Bois’s key friendships with liberal white ministers during this period, not to mention his regular presence at their churches. Du Bois continued to draw on religious imagery at the end of his life, Blum shows, through poems such as “Ghana Calls” (1962), and invoked Genesis when in one of his final speeches remarked (to Africans): “China is flesh of your flesh, and blood of your blood” (201). For Du Bois Communism was the last great hope for humankind, but this firm conviction did not impugn religion or render it powerless—it imbued it with sacred significance and spiritual power.

Although some may describe the tone of Blum’s book as very appreciative of Du Bois, and clearly laudatory, Blum tackles shortcomings of one of his spiritual heroes—namely Du Bois’s harsh anti-Semitic statements in several early versions of Souls (Du Bois removed sinister statements against Jews in later editions of Souls, evidently inspired by what he witnessed in the Holocaust), and his consistent praise of Stalin even after Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 began to reveal details of some of his predecessor’s murderous rampages. Given the media’s crafted presentation of news and caricatures of black Americans, Blum argues that Du Bois had legitimate reasons to doubt reports he heard coming out of Russia. This Cold War context is an important point to remember, and one that Brenda Plummer and Mary Dudziak contextualize very helpfully in their work, and the subject of critical discussion here. In my reading, Blum’s navigation of these difficulties is both careful and convincing.

Build It, and They Will Come, or, The Cost of Doing Business: Megachurches and American Religion

Megachurches have been the subject of much interest--the faithful flock to them, journalists are endlessly fascinated by them, the media often misunderstand them, sometimes scholars scoff at them, while others steer clear of them.....the list goes on. How would you know a megachurch if you saw one? How does one define a megachurch? (Find some answers here.)

Either way, according to a new book by megachurch expert Scott Thumma and co-author Dave Travis, Beyond Megachurch Myths, megachurches are here to stay. See the book's website here, blog here, on-line extras here, an interesting megachurch research portal here, and excerpts here. I had the privilege of lunching with Scott last summer on a dissertation research trip to New England, and he is quite welcoming, quite generous, and a fine scholar--not to mention a scholar with expert web skills.

If you are not familiar with Thumma's work, and if you want to learn about these mysterious entities we call megachurches, spend some time surfing around the Hartford Institute for Religion Research website, and you will see why. The bibliography is extensive, and helpful. The Megachurches Today Surveys from 2000 and 2005 are important to read through. The resources are beyond helpful. And the learning is, as the commercial says, "priceless"--an apt term for megachurches no doubt.

Living in Houston, I often drive by megachurches--including Lakewood Church, Second Baptist Church, First Baptist Church, Fellowship of the Woodlands, Grace Community Church, etc. The list goes on and on, since Houston freeways, highways, and byways seemingly run forever, particularly if you are stuck in Houston traffic. I should also say that a large amount of my research is on megachurches, and megapastors--subjects worthy of critical scholarly endeavor. Just ask Robert Wuthnow, Nancy Ammerman, Donald Miller, Mara Einstein, Shayne Lee, James Twitchell, etc. There are many others....

And I'm persuaded that one way to understand megachurches is to use a marketplace approach to studying American religion. Popularized by the likes of sociologists of religion--and Rodney Stark and Roger Finke in particular--this approach more or less see churches as firms that offer religious goods and services to spiritual consumers. This is not as reductionistic as it sounds, nor am I necessarily proposing statistical understandings of religious firms and spiritual consumers, but suggesting a historically-grounded sociological analysis tempered with insights drawn from anthropology, media studies, ethnography, etc. Using multiple angles of analysis, with enough participant-observation, allows one to examine conceptions of sacred space, understand the lived religion of participants and members, explore the uses of media, intersections between religion and commodification, etc. [Look for project announcements about something like this soon.]

Have you ever been to a megachurch? Your expectations before going? Impressions afterward? What were your experiences like? Were you greeted as a consumer? Are these structures too big?

[Photo comes from an MSNBC story on Lakewood. Readers may also note that this picture appears on the cover of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 1: Religion. Oddly, and surprisingly, while Lakewood appears on the cover, it is nowhere to be found inside the covers--a really, really, shocking omission for a "new" volume on southern religion.]

Baldblogger Interviews Edward J. Blum, Part 2

Baldblogger (BB): Your previous book Reforging the White Republic, chronicled the reasons for sectional reunion following the Civil War and the central role Christianity played in the process. In many ways W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet is in very deep conversation with this work, as you recount the multiple and inventive, creative ways Du Bois responded to the history you traced in Reforging. Can you discuss how, in your own mind, these books relate?

Ed Blum (EB): I first decided to write about Du Bois and religion when I was finishing my dissertation and had an interview at the Harvard Divinity School. The position was in African American religion and so I thought – who better to talk about at Harvard than Du Bois (since Du Bois was a student there in the late nineteenth century and was the first black man to receive a PhD from Harvard). And wouldn’t you know, I was looking through a box of “used” books at the local bookstore and they had a copy of Phil Zuckerman’s edited Du Bois on Religion. Talk about serendipitous or providence or dumb luck. The documents that Zuckerman edited, along with my dissertation research, were the core of my Harvard job talk. I didn’t get the job, but that’s another story. One fascinating outcome of not getting the Harvard job is that half of my Du Bois book was written in the basement of house (when I was a fellow) and I reveled in writing a subversive book from underground. It made me think a little of the beginning of Ellison’s Invisible Man.

It seemed to me that Du Bois understood what few other scholars had: that religion sat at the base of American notions of its nationhood, which tended to privilege being white and being Protestant. And this was the story I wrote about in my first book. In it, I looked at how religious ideas and leaders reconciled northern and southern whites after the Civil War. The tragedy of this was not their reunion, but its white supremacist form. By 1900, northern and southern whites seemed to agree on one thing – they were equally invested in subordinating African Americans. And both sections did it in the name of Christianity.

After writing a book about how Protestant Christianity played a role in reconciling whites and legitimating Jim Crow, lynchings, and racial imperialism, I thought it would be neat to write on those who challenged that world. And Du Bois was the man. So the Du Bois book is kind of a sequel to my first book, or perhaps its an anti-sequel.


BB: Du Bois is a seemingly timeless and very complex historical actor. What sparked your interest in Du Bois, perhaps in terms of historiographical project and in terms of your own personal respect and adoration for him?

EB: The scholarship on Du Bois is massive and it tends to come from the very best in the field. David Lewis, a doyen of American history, wrote two mammoth biographies of Du Bois – both of which are wonderful. Arnold Rampersad, a world-renowned literary critic, had done a book on the literary imagination of Du Bois. Gerald Horne, one of the best historians of the past decades [BB: one of my graduate professors at the University of Houston], did a biography on Du Bois’s years during the Cold War; Shamoon Zamir wrote a wonderful monograph on Du Bois’s early education. The list could go on and on. But they had formed a consensus – that Du Bois was irreligious or antireligious. And this led to some weird interpretations. For example, Rampersad claimed that Du Bois’s poem “A Litany at Atlanta” was a “debate … not between a man and a distant God, but within the speaker himself.” But if you read the poem, Du Bois speaks directly to God. And it was written just before Du Bois wrote prayers for his students at Atlanta University.

This was completely unintended, but all of the claims that Du Bois was anti-religious led religious historians to pay him little heed. This, to me, was a tragedy. So I decided to take on the existing literature, especially David Lewis, and to claim that Du Bois was perhaps the most thoughtful writer on religion in American history.

I was also deeply influenced by Louis DeCaro's [BB: Be sure to check out DeCaro's work on abolitionist John Brown] marvelous religious biography of Malcolm X, On the Side of My People. Even though Malcolm X was a minister, most scholarship on him had focused on his political and civil rights work, as if they could be separated from his religious imagination. DeCaro's study helped me think about how spirituality animated Du Bois's life and times were as well.

I also wrote the book because Du Bois is a teacher of mine. I feel so privileged to sit with his works, to read them, to digest them, to consider not only their contents but also the amazing work that he put in for them. With few research funds; with little access to archives; with hundreds of projects on his docket, Du Bois wrote with such depth and insight that it gives me chills. I wrote on Du Bois to forge a stronger relationship with him; and I often imagine what he would think of the book.


BB: Is it accurate to say you envision yourself as a scholar in a kind of Du Boisian tradition, canvassing multiple historical and contemporary terrains, and crafting perspectives using historical, sociological, ethnographic, philosophical, etc. lenses? Do you consider yourself a “moral intellectual” (p. 132) in a Du Boisian sense? If so, how do you see your work reflecting this?

EB: I definitely consider myself writing in a Du Boisian tradition – basically meaning I take an interdisciplinary approach. This type of work is usually done by scholars in American Studies circles, and I would suggest that Du Bois pioneered this tradition well before Perry Miller and Arthur Schlesinger. I guess I see myself as a moral historian but it comes more from Sidney Ahlstrom (perhaps the twentieth century's finest historian of US religion). Ahlstrom always said that the historian must look at the moral world around her or him and see how it came to be. So I write about race and religion always with an eye to today. This does not mean that my work is presentist. I certainly believe that the past should be understood on its own terms. Yet I want to see paths that seemed to work and paths that did not in creating loving communities.

BB: Often biographers talk about putting their subjects on the proverbial psychologist’s couch—an allusion to an author’s psychoanalysis of his/her subject. Was this an exercise in which you engaged writing the book on Du Bois?

EB: Oh no, there was no putting Du Bois on the couch. In fact, I tried to avoid any form of psychoanalysis. The main reason for this is that too often biographers had written of Du Bois’s mind and soul as if they knew what he believed. But we never really know that. We know what he wrote, what he said, what others said about him. We cannot truly know what went on in the recesses of his head or his subconscious. For Du Bois, we really do not need to do that kind of work. He wrote so much – whether in letters, monographs, autobiographies, and novels – that there is plenty of material. Perhaps I psychoanalyze Du Bois when I examine his literary works – his poems about black Christs and his novels about female messiahs. I definitely suggest that these fictional works point to a deep spirituality; that could be wrong. They could be purely pragmatic and Du Bois could have thought, deep down, that they were fictional lies. I doubt it, but it’s possible.

"Blum(ing)" Around with W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet, Part 3

Ch. 3
Blum’s third chapter studies Du Bois as a historian and a sociologist, paying particular attention to the religious dimensions and spiritual interpretations Du Bois offered in works such as The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and John Brown (1909). Blum shows that at the base of Du Bois’s careful social, economic, cultural, and political analyses of black life in the United States rested the deep conviction that white supremacy and its expressions of faith constituted a religious problem, what Blum terms the “spiritual wages of whiteness” (103). For Du Bois, white supremacy was a problem of global significance, chronicled in key works throughout the twentieth century: Darkwater (1920), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), and The World and Africa (1946). Spiritual rage and righteous indignation peppered Du Bois's reflections.

Ch. 4
Further clarifying Du Bois’s conception of white supremacy as a theological concept, chapter four provides careful readings of Du Bois’s creative writing, and the imaginative ways he testified to and about the sacred dimensions of black religious life. In novels, plays, short stories, and reflections that appeared in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, Du Bois reimagined religious life in the United States where black biblical characters assailed and condemned the religion of white supremacy. Blum’s starkly disturbing and jarring accounts of the ritualized dimensions of lynching and the sacred significance whites attached to it, renders the spiritual dimensions of Du Bois’s creative offerings striking—particularly in Crisis articles “The Gospel According to Mary Brown” (1919) and “The Son of God” (1933), short stories in Darkwater, and novels—works Blum discusses alongside similarly creative musings from Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, for instance, and even Frederick Douglass and David Walker the century previous. Blum perceptively demonstrates how like a Hebrew prophet of old, in his literary work Du Bois located “dramas of redemption” (180) in the midst of suffering, violence, and gross inhumanity, placing black characters at the center of the story as spiritual exemplars and arbiters of redemption; it is here readers may rightly find “the gospel according to W.E.B. Du Bois” (153).

[Photo from UMass Digital Archive]

Baldblogger Interviews Edward J. Blum, Part 1

As promised in a previous post, this summer will feature an interview with Ed Blum about his work on W.E.B. Du Bois and related topics. Our hope is to use this forum to have a conversation; we hope you will join the discussion. Here we go.....


Baldblogger (BB): From a previous interview we know you grew up in NYC. If you don’t mind, briefly trace your academic journey through your undergrad years and grad school. Any formative teachers? Why were they so influential?

Ed Blum (EB): I attended the University of Michigan in the late 1990s and majored in history. There, I had a course in American Religious History with Susan Juster, and it convinced me that religious history was the discipline for me. I was fascinated by the primary and secondary documents she put together, especially Gail Bederman’s article on the Men and Religion Forward Movement of the early twentieth century. For the end of the semester, I wrote a paper comparing and contrasting that movement with the Promise Keepers, who were at the time growing and garnering a lot of attention. I remember going with my father to Promise Keeper’s mammoth meeting in Washington, DC, and thinking how weird it was that I studied these guys. I had a bunch of other professors at Michigan who were fantastic. Jon Carson was new and he agreed to direct my undergraduate thesis, which was a study of Dwight Moody’s revivals in Boston in 1877. Since my name is Ed, My peers teased me about working with “Johnny Carson.” Of course, my students wouldn’t even get that joke today. I remember getting coffee with Jon and feeling like I was somebody, because at such a large school it was easy to feel like a number.

During my junior year, which turned out to be my final year at Michigan, I started applying to graduate programs in history and to seminaries. I decided that becoming a 23 year old minister just didn’t feel right so I trekked off to the University of Kentucky to work with Kathi Kern. I went with the object of studying religion and gender, but found myself pulled into issues of race in the course of my reading. It didn’t hurt that Joanne Melish, a scholar of New England and slavery, had just arrived and pushed me in that direction. Kern and Melish, along with Mark Summers (a political historian) were amazing. They read my material right away; they critiqued it; they encouraged me; they brought me into their families; Melish even read my paragraphs out loud to me so that I could hear the sound of the phrases and rhythm. And Kern, while I was there, published a book on religion and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – another figure who is often considered anti-religious so I feel honored that my Du Bois book joins her work on Stanton. When I finished my dissertation, Dr. Kern and I would sit, have cupcakes, and discuss how each chapter could be improved. Those conversations helped me transform it from a dissertation into a book.


BB: What inspired your interest in the 19th century American history, and why race and religion?

EB: I was drawn to the nineteenth century, particularly the issue of post-Civil War race and religion, because I felt like historians had done a poor job there. I found that of the antebellum era, there were great books on religion: Timothy Smith and David [Richard] Carwardine had done amazing studies, along with Paul Johnson, Sean Wilentz, and Ann Braude. But after the war, religion seemed to be unimportant. Eric Foner and James McPherson hardly discussed religion at all, and when they did it was only black religion. Evangelical scholars, like George Marsden and Mark Noll, paid little attention too. When they did, moreover, they failed to discuss what seemed to be the most important element: race. So basically I wanted to challenge both the broader historians, like Foner, by including religion and the religious historians, by including race. From there my first book came out on race, religion, and American nationalism from the civil war to the end of the century.

I decided to write on Du Bois after that for a number of reasons. He was the great critic of the white supremacist America of the nineteenth century; religious historians ignored him basically; scholars on him, like David Lewis and Arnold Rampersad, had ignored religion. Finally, I found as I was reading Du Bois that I was learning so much about religion and society. I found that Du Bois seemed to understand the joys and the pains, the hopes and the disappointments that had come from faith and religious ideas in the American experiment. So I wanted to join his journey.

BB: Can you discuss identity politics and the/your study of race and religion?

EB: Identity politics are very important for good and for ill. I grew up with every advantage that the white upper-middle-class world offers. I had small classes; I had highly educated high school teachers; I was never pulled over when driving because of my skin tone; if and when I screwed up, we had the money to overcome any mistakes. My family paid for my entire college education – as an out-of-state student at Michigan. Basically an unspoken white affirmative action plan was in place for me. Only a handful of times did I ever attend a black church; and I did not have any African American friends as a young man. So, there is an experiential side of African American life that I do not understand and cannot understand – that I cannot feel. I didn’t sing the spirituals in those days; I didn’t fear the police; I didn’t worry about finances. And I believe this is important. Those types of experiences offer unique insights and perceptions – and they allow individuals to relate in different ways. When on the job market, there were definitely times when universities seemed to want a candidate who had had these experiences. I know that many whites begrudge this, but I don’t. The truth is there are too few African Americans in the academy. We need more; we need their variety of experiences to be brought to the study not only of African American life, but to all of the disciplines. As a white person, I think it is crucial to approach the study of race as a listener, as one open to hear the voices of others. I think Edward Said put it best about the kind of listening I try to do: “there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge – if that is what it is – that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons.” My goal is the kind of understanding that leads to enlargements of horizons and communities.

Interesting, I have found that some students seem to think my courses on women’s history or on African American history are “more true” because I’m a white male. I think their (flawed) reasoning goes that since I (seemingly) do not have a vested interest in the study I will teach the facts and not just politics. A middle-aged white male student said to me after the first day of women’s history, “I’m so glad a feminist isn’t teaching the class.” Of course, little did he know that I am in support of the feminist movement. To me, this is a sad commentary on how our media presents members of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement – that somehow they have an interest, but white men are disinterested and therefore more believable. C’mon, who understand not only black life, but American life, better in 1965: Fannie Lou Hamer or Daniel Patrick Moynihan? Obviously, Hamer.

BB: What is a “typical” day for you in San Diego? At SDSU? What are the best things about being a history professor? What classes do you teach at SDSU, and what classes do you hope to teach in the future?

EB: San Diego is an oasis (or at the very least a desert that is nicely watered). A typical day begins with a walk of our dog SNCC (he’s named after the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; we don’t have children yet but they’ll probably get historical names too). Then it’s off to the gym to try and run 3 miles. It gets harder and harder. Then, by about 8 I get to the office. I try to reserve my mornings to write. That is the best time for me. I usually put on some kind of piano music and try to write to the rhythm. I see prose writing as quite similar to music. And then after lunch I typically teach. I am the nineteenth century U.S. historian at SDSU so I teach courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, on the Age of Jackson, on religion in America, and the US history survey courses. In time, I will put together a class on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and on biography and autobiography. Then, after class, I have a few die-hard students who have question after questions. This is my favorite part of the day; these students are busily comparing what they learn in my class with their other ones. I love seeing their minds at work. At about 5 I head home; dinner, play with the dog, tell my wife that she is amazing (which is true) and then read some on our deck. It’s a good life.

"Blum(ing)" Around with W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet, Part 2

No new devotions with Du Bois as outlined in a previous post, but I return here with the second of several posts reviewing Ed Blum's new book on W.E.B. Du Bois. Hopefully readers have had a chance to begin reading this fine book.

Ch. 1
Blum's opening chapter helpfully situates Du Bois’s created self within the history of black autobiography. Drawing from literary theory, Blum tours Du Bois’s autobiographies, publications such as Darkwater (1920), “The Revelation of Saint Orgne, the Damned” (1938), and Dusk of Dawn (1940). Blum deftly shows how Du Bois created and offered a religious self to readers in conversation with and in response to the particularities of the moment, whether it was instances of lynching, the publications of a racist author (i.e., Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman [1905]), or imperialistic and immoral wars that took place during his lifetime.

Ch. 2
Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is the subject of chapter 2. Here Blum illuminatingly situates Souls in the context of nineteenth century reflection on spiritually-informed racial understanding, and pays keen attention to the book’s reception both in America and abroad throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From these vantage points, Blum brings Souls into conversation with nineteenth-century theological and historical reflection on racialized conceptions of religion and spiritual worth, though he asserts not with the depth of spiritual insight that Du Bois offered.

Adding to his previous work in Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005), Blum crafts a late-nineteenth and early twentieth history of American religion that intelligently shows who, what, when, where, why, and how both Northern and Southern whites more aggressively associated whiteness with godliness, baptizing white supremacy as a kind of national religion, replete with sacred texts, religious rituals, and spiritual practices, subjects Blum takes up with gripping detail in chapters three and four as well. It is against this backdrop that Blum’s reading of Souls becomes so powerful, as he captures the spiritual fervor, righteous anger, theological creativity, and sacred understanding Du Bois displayed in this seminal text—from his careful rendering of black spirituals, for instance, to the brilliant way Du Bois imagined and aligned chapter titles with the Thirty Nine Articles—clear evidence Du Bois intended Souls “to be taken as a new set of religious articles, a new code of faith for the new century” (78). Ultimately, Blum clearly shows that Du Bois’s literary, historical, sociological, and even theological prowess stands unmatched, and in the book’s most important chapter solidifies Du Bois’s role as an American prophet who still speaks.

Up next: chs. 3 and 4.

[Photo from UMass Digital Archive.]

Child's Play?: Religious Toys and Race

Mara Einstein over at Brands of Faith (in light of this post be sure to pick up her forthcoming book) posts about Bible toys at Wal-Mart. In collaboration with the religious toy company one2believe, next month Wal-Mart begins selling Bible characters -- Jesus, Mary, Paul, Peter, Esther, and David, just to name a few.

Interesting as well are the company's P31 dolls, toys (according to its website) "based on the biblical teaching of Proverbs 31...specifically designed to provide a Bible-based, Christian alternative to other secular toys on the market, and to encourage young girls to pursue biblical womanhood....It is our prayer that the Lord would use these dolls as a means to encourage the girls of today to become Proverbs 31 women of tomorrow!" Included with the toys are Bible lessons, an accessory kit, recipies, and cookie cutters, tools that suggest the company supports domestic teaching and learning for P31 women. Of the four P31 dolls currently available, "Leah" is an African American doll, while the others are clearly white.

From the vantage point of religious goods in the spiritual marketplace, these toys are simply the latest example of trends and products religion scholars Colleen McDannell and Heather Hendershot carefully write about here and here.

From another perspective, these products display another sad example of the association of whiteness with godliness, and the depiction of biblical characters as Euro-Americans. American religion and capitalism work in sinister collusion yet again. No doubt the company sees these toys as evangelistic tools, but I wonder if parents who purchase these products will realize the connections these toys suggest, and the psychological associations their kids will invariably make playing with these figures, in many cases subtly and powerfully reinforcing racial codes of white supremacy?

Religion and Politics in 2008

Ed Blum has an interesting and provacative article on what W.E.B. Du Bois has to say to contemporary politicians, and the contribution Du Bois can make to today's discussions about politics. Read it here. (HT: Paul Harvey)

Devotions with Du Bois, Day 2

Commentary and context:

Prayers for Dark People constitutes the prayers Du Bois penned during 1909-1910, in his early 40s, while teaching at Atlanta University, which at the time held classes for what today we’d call elementary, middle, high school, and college students. This gives the prayers and meditations a didactic quality, though not pedantic, and it is probably not too much to say that the prayers reflect something of a pastoral tone. The messages are certainly moralistic, focused on virtue (sometimes even “holiness”), yet there is a spiritual urgency in his words as well, a firm conviction to sieze the day. Some prayers have a theme attached to them (e.g., “Cleanliness”), while others end with one or two scripture references. The upshot is clearly practical theology, something akin to what some contemporaries called the Social Gospel.

At the time, Du Bois had published his well-known The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and in 1909 published his study of John Brown, who he considered to be something of a spiritual exemplar. In 1095 Du Bois co-organized the Niagra Movement, which later became the the NAACP. Du Bois lost his first son Burghart in 1899, and the following year attened the first Pan-African Congress in London, at which he was elected Secretary. The final point to mention about the larger context surrounding the composition of the prayers, Du Bois left Atlanta Univeristy in 1910 to assume editorship of The Crisis, the key publication of the NAACP, and oversee other editorial tasks for the organization.

[Photo from the online archive at UMASS-Amherst.]

Scholars and Starbucks

No, this is not a post about drinking coffee to stay up late to read or write, though that is often what I do in these final days and weeks of dissertation writing. Rather, this is a presentation by historian Bryant Simon discussing the cultural meaning of Starbucks, and the social meanings of coffee, consumption, and commodification. No doubt his forthcoming book will stir up great discussion -- conducted over a cup of coffee of course. (HT: The Brew)

NEW: My good friend and colleague LK (read here) has some interesting thoughts related to what Simon discusses.

Matisyahu in Houston

Tonight with two good friends and my son Matthew, I went to the Matisyahu show in Houston. For those who may not know, Matisyahu is a Hasidic reggae artist. You've probably never heard anything like it. (NEW: Matisyahu interview here.)

It was the first concert I had been to since my freshman year in college, sometime in 1996. In fact, Matisyahu played at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, where I went to my last concert--and if memory serves me correctly I saw Sheryl Crow. (I'm not even a Crow fan, I think I got the tickets for free.)

The set lasted for about an hour, and he was in top form. Matisyahu opened with "Fire of Heaven/Alter of Earth" (the opening track on the Youth CD) , sang "Jerusalem" of course, as well as the prayerful "Close My Eyes" (from Live at Stubbs), among others. He also displayed his customary beatboxing skills, this time linking his vocally percussive expression to a nice piano tune. (For examples, check out this blog.) One hopes to hear more of this on future CDs.

I sat way out on the lawn, and so was away from the energy of the stage. Nevertheless it was a good show.

The biblical scope of Matisyahu's music still resonates deeply; his music possesses the depth of the blues, and the energy and improvisational quality of jazz. Every encounter changes the soul.

Devotions with Du Bois, Day 1

This post announces a summer series, a new venture of sorts. I’ll craft devotionals from W.E.B. Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). Perhaps you’ll purchase a copy and read along, offering your own take in the comments section. Think of it as an interactive call and response, with Du Bois in the pulpit. He still speaks today.

The series, what I’m calling “Devotions with Du Bois,” reflects a growing interest in W.E.B. Du Bois, and an explicit investigation into that which constituted his faith--or at least his relationship to Christianity. It also comes from a pedagogical conviction that interactive (literally), organic exchanges constitute learning. I don’t know everything, and conversation is sometimes a wonderful teacher. Third, it is also my conviction that some of the keenest spiritual insight often shows up in the unlikeliest of places. Scholars of religion call this “lived religion,” and theologians call it “practical theology.”

This series also comes as I’m reading through the first book length study of Du Bois’s spirituality, Ed Blum’s W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet, recently published with Penn State University Press. (For a summary of posts about Ed's book, read here.)

What do you think? To what extent can Du Bois speak as a spiritual authority, or even a “pastor” today? Can he be called a spiritual leader? Is he a prophet? Why or why not?

[Picture from the online archive at UMASS-Amherst.]

A Hot Topic: Spending the Summer with W.E.B. Du Bois

This post announces a series of reflections on Ed Blum’s new book titled W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet. A companion series will examine some of Du Bois’s prayers. In addition to commentary on Blum’s book, I’m happy to report Ed will appear in a few weeks in the form of an interview here at bald blogging. (See another interview with Ed here.)

(Interested readers may also want to pick up Phil Zuckerman’s wonderful compilation of Du Bois’s religious writings, Du Bois on Religion. It is a must read.)

Now, on to the opening post….

In Manning Marable’s Living History: How Reimagining the African-American Past Can Remake America’s Racial Future (2006), he writes about “Resurrecting the Radical Du Bois” (ch. 3). Marable’s stellar book prompts readers to resurrect Du Bois’s “revolutionary and radical politics” (111), and in particular Du Bois’s relationship with and to Marxism in the U.S. and Europe. Revolutionary politics, of course, involves a trenchant critique of “structural racism,” (113) across the globe. Marable also suggests anew studies of Du Bois in light of feminist scholarship as well as analyses of the aesthetic sensibilities that appear in his work.

Marable’s choice of the word “resurrection” to call for a study of Du Bois with new eyes ironically overlooks religion altogether. What Marable overlooks, Blum centers, and the result is a fascinatingly stunning look at an American prophet.

Blum’s work uncovers multiple religious selves in Du Bois, and charts the evolution of his relationship to faith, spirituality, and Christianity. Blum canvasses Du Bois’s corpus, and thematically investigates The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s sociology of religion, his understanding of Christianity and Communism, the uses of religion in Du Bois’s creative work, and the reception of the spiritual Du Bois.

Blum’s writing is clear and lucid, and his ability to craft poetic statements that summarize and/or explain is something to emulation. Here’s an example: “What emerges from Du Bois’s imagination is a riveting tale where angels masqueraded as teachers, where demons cloaked themselves as moderates, where economic policies had spiritual outcomes, where prophets postured as professors, and where the seemingly irreligious Du Bois [according to previous biographers] was the nation’s holy seer” (8). And another: “It is the spiritual side, the soulfulness of his life and the religious power of his prose and personality that this book seeks to unveil” (10). Readers familiar with Du Bois will notice the interesting use of terms here.

It is also worth mentioning Blum’s personal reflections on Du Bois in the Acknowledgements section of the book. “I wrote this book as an acolyte,” Blum writes, “imagining myself sitting at Du Bois’s feet, reading over his shoulder, and listening to the responses of the many he touch. I wrote this book to learn religion and spirituality from Du Bois….I prayed his prayers to my students and endeavored to feel his moving in their hearts” (273). Such a personal revelation offers helpful perspective, and it is not too much to say that one feels Blum’s deep engagement with Du Bois on nearly every page. The Professor still teaches. And if Blum learned from Du Bois, then we can listen to and learn from him too, and with Blum, understand, embrace, and enact the ways Du Bois prompted people to make the world a more peaceful, just, and equitable place to live.