Divine discontent : the religious imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois
"W. E. B. Du Bois is an improbable candidate for a project in religion. His skepticism of and even hostility toward religion is readily established and canonically accepted. Indeed, he spent his career rejecting normative religious commitments to institutions and supernatural beliefs. Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois offers a fresh and controversial reading of W. E. B. Du Bois and recovers the deep religious ethos of his writings. Du Bois's voice of moral outrage and reform, of political activism and black unity, emerges from passionate engagements with religious rhetoric, ideas, and stories. Jonathon Kahn contends that the standard treatment of Du Bois turns a deaf ear to his writings. For if we are open to their religious timbre, those writingsfrom his epoch-making The Souls of Black Folk to his unstudied series of parables that depicts the lynching of an African American Christ - reveal a virtual obsession with religion." "Yet Du Bois's voice, marked by its particular idiosyncrasies, is radically different from other African American religious voices of the time. Despite his religious fixation, Du Bois renounces his belief in a supernatural God and heavenly salvation. And his religious orientation is distinctly heterodox - existing outside the bounds of institutional Christianity. Du Bois seeks instead to craft a black religious faith of his own, an amalgam of American pragmatism and African American belief. This faith - Du Bois's African American pragmatic religious naturalism - pays homage to African American Christian pasts but radically reconfigures them for a democratic and ecumenical future. In using pragmatism to transform African American religious thought, Du Bois inaugurates a twentieth-century tradition to which Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and James Baldwin belong. Drawing on philosophy, literary criticism, and religious thought, Divine Discontent recovers and introduces readers to the remarkably complex and varied religious world in Du Bois's writings. It is a world of sermons, of religious virtues such as sacrifice and piety, and of jeremiads that fight for a black American nation within the larger nation."--BOOK JACKET
Print Book, English, 2009
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009