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The Religion & Culture Web Forum

April 2005

Seeking a Prophet: How Religion Mediates the Relationship between Black America and the U.S. Presidents

by Melissa Harris Lacewell
University of Chicago

This month, Melissa Harris Lacewell of the University of Chicago examines the complex relationship between African Americans and the American President, the public face of the United States Government. In this draft version of an upcoming paper, Professor Harris Lacewell focuses on the determining influence of the black church in this relationship.

The black church also offers African Americans unique religious ideas and organic theologies that distinguish black religiosity. These theologies of the black church are rooted in specific understandings of biblical texts that grow out of black experiences of bondage and oppression. The black church is not only an organizational space that gives rise to unique racial and cultural formations, but also an interpreter of the black experience in America that gives rise to unique theological formulations....
African American commitment to and emphasis on Old Testament prophets is important for understanding black public opinion relative to the presidents. I propose that the ideal of the prophet of social justice and equality is the standard against which black America judges American presidents....

Read Melissa Harris Lacewell's full essay.

At the beginning of April, invited responses to the essay by John Brehm and Omar McRoberts, both of the University of Chicago, will be posted on the forum's discussion board, where readers are invited to post their own thoughts. The commentary will run through the month of April, after which it will continue to be accessible through the Web Forum archive.

The Martin Marty Center's Religion and Culture Web Forum is an online forum for thought-provoking discussion on the relationship of scholarship in religion to culture and public life. Each month the Marty Center, the research arm of the University of Chicago Divinity School, invites a scholar of religion to comment on his or her own research in a way that "opens out" to themes, problems, and events in world cultures and contemporary life. Scholars from diverse fields of study are invited to offer responses to these commentaries on the forum's discussion board, where the public is also encouraged to post thoughts and reactions to commentaries and invited responses.

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