That Blessed Book: The Interfaith Roots of an African American Biblical Imagination (SC-652)

Course Details:

Africans and their descendants in North America developed a distinctive tradition of Bible reading that evinces a prophetic-apocalyptic imagination with an ethic of perseverance. That evidence is found in biblical texts embedded in a wide variety of prayers, songs, stories, and sermons. This course examines selected African American orature (e.g., spirituals and folklore) and literature to explore the formation of the Black Church’s biblical “canon within a canon” as the result of an extensive “interfaith” and multi-cultural conversation and negotiation among diverse African ethnicities in the slave communities of the United States. While “interfaith” refers to the full spectrum of religious world views (Smart) Africans carried to North America, special attention will be paid to the importance of African Muslims as a source of epistemological resistance to enslavers’ Christianity and as agents of “local assimilation” of the Bible in the Christian religion of the enslaved and the formation of the Black Church.    

Course fulfills the following curricular requirements:
MAIRS – Islamic Studies: Pluralism
MAIRS – Islamic Studies Elective
MAIRS – Interreligious Studies Elective
MAC – Chaplaincy Elective
MAC – Islamic Chaplaincy Elective

Instructor: Cheryl Townsend Gilkes

Course Downloads:

• That Blessed Book-Preliminary Syllabus-Sp23