This is a rebroadcast of last year's episode. (It's a good one!)

Lauren chats with Rev. Julian Cook about the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter Rauschenbusch: on their scholarly endeavors, social environments, and church life. Together Lauren and Julian ask, is there a Black social gospel as Dorrien suggests? Lauren begins the episode by surveying the historical context of this period. In the final section of the episode, Lauren and Julian talk about how they experience the tensions of theory and praxis, philosophy and art.

When we talk about the turn-of-the-century, we’re talking about these overlapping categories:

1865-1877 - Reconstruction Era 1870s-1900 - The “Gilded Age” 1897-1920 - Progressive Era

{2:07} Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 by Gail Bederman: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3683791.html

{4:11} That’s “non-white races."

{08:40} Make that two falls ago.

{08:46} Sweet baby Langston is a toddler now!

{15:55} The books by Traci C. West that we mention: Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance and Disruptive Christian Ethics. Julian currently studies with Dr. West, and she was on my dissertation committee.

{25:00} The Crisis, the “Black folks’ Bible,” was founded by Du Bois as a publication of the NAACP in 1910. Read archived issues of the magazine here: https://modjourn.org/journal/crisis/

{25:41} Ida B. Wells, mentioned earlier as well, was a Black feminist activist who spoke out against the lynching of Black men, among other causes.

{26:16} “Progress” and “progressive” had very particular meanings in this time period. It’s not how we use this language today. Simply, folks believed that social progress would lead to (a) a utopian society or (b) the Second Coming of Christ (the Millennium), depending on the person’s particular spiritual beliefs. The United States played an important role in this narrative as a Christian nation/white nation.

{30:46} Keri L. Day is a theologian and scholar of African-American religion at Princeton Theological Seminary: https://www.ptsem.edu/people/keri-day

{31:23} Reinhold Niebuhr was a key figure in the social gospel and a prominent Christian ethicist who taught at Union Theological Seminary for many years. His most well-known book is Moral Man and Immoral Society.

{32:55} Father Divine was the leader of the International Peace Mission movement. He has been called a cult leader by some and a social activist by others. See West’s chapter on him in Disruptive Christian Ethics or Judith Weisenfeld’s chapter in Devotions and Desires https://uncpress.org/book/9781469636269/devotions-and-desires

{37:55} “I went to Harvard.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz0XxyhTRnc

{40:36} Read more on the fundamentalist and modernist debate here: https://tabletalkmagazine.com/article/2020/05/the-fundamentalist-modernist-controversy

See Julian’s complete bio: https://www.houghton.edu/staff-members/julian-cook