Remembering the Neighborhood: Church, Disability, and Religious Memory
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 10
Abstract
This article focuses on rituals of community life within a North American church in which many of the congregants live with psychiatric disabilities and whose participation in religious life is affected by their experiences of poverty and gentrification. I begin by exploring an aesthetic practice of remembrance that the postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identifies and performs in an essay entitled “Harlem”. Drawing upon Spivak’s description of an imaginative practice she identifies as “teleiopoiesis” and my own ethnographic research, including participant observation and interviews, I analyze an example of how this community incorporates visual art into its practices of communal memory as part of one church’s weeklong liturgy. I then argue for the church’s gathering of members from across the city as a practice of remembrance across time and space that confronts the structures and injustices of urban life that challenge the communal identity emerging from this congregation’s religious practices.
Authors and Affiliations
Rebecca F. Spurrier
Varieties of Quest and the Religious Openness Hypothesis within Religious Fundamentalist and Biblical Foundationalist Ideological Surrounds
According to the Religious Openness Hypothesis, the religious and psychological openness of American Christians is obscured by a defensive ghettoization of thought associated with a Religious Fundamentalist Ideological...
Believing Selves and Cognitive Dissonance: Connecting Individual and Society via “Belief”
“Belief” as an analytical tool and critical category of investigation for the study of religion has been a resurging topic of interest. This article discusses the problems of language and practice in the discussion of...
On the Question at the End of Theodicy
This article argues that theodicy provides an insufficient response to suffering - one that often further victimizes those who suffering most. In it’s place, I argue for a moralist response based on Albert Camus and W....
Multi-Layered Roles of Religion among Refugees Arriving in Austria around 2015
Violent conflicts and social unrest in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and in Africa have led to growing numbers of persons seeking refuge in Europe since 2011. The phenomenon culminated in 2015. In that year, with 8...
A Transcendentalist Nature Religion
Scholars of religion have often pointed to the Transcendentalists as progenitors of a distinct tradition of nature religion in the United States. Nevertheless, this work has not fully dealt with the problematic qualiti...