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Lauren Turek Ida B. Wells I recently came across this call for chapter proposals for a new edited volume tentatively entitled Religion and Black Feminist Public Intellectuals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present . The deadline for proposals is on June 25, 2018. More details below: Since the nineteenth century, Christian black female public intellectuals have called attention to and protested against the discrimination of African American women on the basis of their race, class, and gender, and particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their sexual orientation. Drawing on their spiritual authority, many of these black feminists, including Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Pauli Murray, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, and Renita Weems, have attempted to dislodge the normative thinking that has occluded the presence of these injustices. Whether marching, writing, preaching, or speaking, their goal has been to challenge and undermine dis...

Andrea L. Turpin Today over at The Conversation I was asked to share my reflections on what the history of evangelical women's education can tell us about Paige Patterson, Beth Moore, and the possible future of the Southern Baptist Convention. Here is a taste: Southern Baptist Convention leader Paige Patterson was asked to step down early Wednesday morning following a meeting of the board of trustees of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he served as president. With a following of over 15 million, Southern Baptists are America's largest Protestant denomination.  Trustees were responding to a petition by over 3,000 Southern Baptist women regarding what they called Patterson’s “unbiblical” remarks on womanhood, sexuality and domestic violence. In an audio recording from 2000 that surfaced recently, Patterson was heard counseling a woman to stay with her abusive husband. In another sermon, he commented on a 16-year-old girl's body. And even as the trus...

Benjamin J. Wetzel The Cushwa Center is pleased to celebrate a book publication by one of our former fellows (and former RiAH blogger), Catherine R. Osborne, who is now visiting assistant professor in the department of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University. American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925-1975 was published in April by the University of Chicago Press.  I recently asked Catherine to elaborate more on her work. BW: Briefly, what is the book about and what are its major claims? CO: When I was working on the book and people asked me what it was about, I had five or six answers of varying lengths, depending on how interested I thought they actually were.  The three-word answer is "Catholic modernist architecture," but that's not really true.  First of all, it's not about architecture, exactly.  It's an intellectual and cultural history of mid-20th century approaches to Catholic worship space (which inc...

I recently corresponded with historian James Chappel about his new book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church ( Harvard, 2017 ). Chappel is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. For more information on his research and teaching visit his website .  You define modern as accepting “the split between the public sphere of politics and the private sphere of religion.” You argue that Catholics accepted this spilt between public and private in the 1930s. How did you come to see what it means to be “modern” in this split of public and private? For years, I avoided the term “modern” altogether. It seemed too normative and value-laden to bear much interpretive weight. The concept has a gravitational pull to it, though, and over the years I circled back to it. It helped me to solve a particular problem that arose in the course of my research. As I immersed myself in the archive of mid-century Catholicism, it became incre...