Thursday, November 18, 2010

From East to West

Today, we finish up our seminar on Chicago's religious history by focusing on a history that is still being written. As we discussed last week, the Immigration Act of 1965 radically changed not only the number of people who immigrated into the United States, but also where people were immigrating from. Where northern and southern Europeans had been the most prominent immigrant groups throughout for over a century, immigrants from Asia and Latin America swiftly became most prominent in the years after the Immigration Act.

Today, we'll conclude with one particular tale of this ongoing demographic revolution. Eboo Patel's memoir Acts of Faith is in part a Chicago story, but it's also a story of many of the themes and issues we've confronted here. Today--and REMEMBER we're meeting in room B91--we'll use Patel's memoir as a way to see what has changed and what has stayed the same in Chicago's 100 years of religious history. What has the city constant done to religion? What has religion constantly done to the city?

Thursday, November 4, 2010

A Theology of the Streets

Soul and Food in Chicago, c. 1940s


Elder Lucy Smith, c. 1940s
Today will be discussing the remarkable transformation the city of Chicago--as well as much of the urban north--experience throughout the twentieth century. Where Chicago's African Americans comprised only 1% of the population in 1900, bu 1970 that number would reach 33%. The vast majority of these black migrants were rural southerners running away the oppressive conditions of the segregating south and running towards the economic opportunities in the factories of the urban north. But this demographic and economic transformation also had distinctly religious manifestations as well. We'll be talking about the alternative religiosities and theological innovations of black southerners in the great white north. We'll consider the architectural peculiarities of store front churches, the Pentecostal denominations of Elder Lucy Smith, as well as the rise of Gospel Music in Chicago. As an example, here's Elder Smith's daughter, who became a popular gospel singer in Chicago and abroad.