“Black Religion and Community Unification: Dialogue and Listening Across Black/African American Muslim and Christian Congregations, Art Spaces, and Community Organizing Collectives” (a.k.a. “The Black Religion Summit”) is a convening of collaborators who share the aim of critically exploring how concepts at the intersection of Black Religion and community-engaged listening animate our ongoing work. Supported by a sub-grant from the Henry Luce Foundation’s “Toward A Common Public Life” initiative, we take as our starting point Sherman Jackson’s definition of Black Religion as “a pragmatic, folk-oriented, holy protest” against the “material and psychological effects of white supremacy” that “refuses to separate the quest for otherworldly salvation from the struggle for temporal liberation and a dignified existence” (2005: 4,31). Through our respective Luce-funded projects, each member of our collective is making grounded inquiries into the power of Black Religion to unify communities toward the shared goal of achieving such justice-seeking praxis, while also considering the processes by which Black Religion-inspired movements deliberately or inadvertently perpetuate insider/outside boundaries. Our two-part Black Religion Summit will allow us, as community organizers, scholars, and artists, to collaboratively examine, with the help of community-engaged participants, how these Black Religion movements are defining and demarcating the communities they engage, and how the methods of community-engaged research and theoretically informed listening developed across our projects may help us better understand these dynamics, while making aspects of our collective endeavors widely available to students, scholars, artists, community leaders, and congregations.
The Black Religion Summit is sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation’s “Toward A Common Public Life” initiative and hosted by Dream of Detroit, with the support of Historic Masjid Wali Muhammad. Our Summit is a convening of scholars, community organizers, religious leaders, and artists from five Henry Luce funded collectives including: Black Muslim Internationalism Project, The Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project, The Crossroads Project, Center for Religion and Cities, and Finding Holy Ground: Performing Visions of Race and Justice in America.
The first segment of our convening will take place in Detroit between April 19-April 22, 2024. With more than an 80 percent Black American population, Detroit is facing rapid gentrification and the uneven economic effects of neoliberal development but is also well-known for its enduring traditions of Black Muslim and Black Christian faith-based community organizing against such white supremacist agendas, making it an ideal setting for our gathering. While our delegation will visit several historically important Black Muslim and Black Christian congregational and community organizing spaces, other highlights will include:
The second part of our convening, set to take place in August 2024, will allow some of our collaborators to attend the debut of the two Luce-funded plays on Black Religion at the 2024 International Black Theater Festival in Winston-Salem and a post-performance discussion bringing together the playwrights, festival organizers, and Luce contributors. These plays were produced as part of the Henry Luce Initiative: Finding Holy Ground: Performing Visions of Race and Justice in America.
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