Browsing by Author "Bongmba, Elias K."
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Item At the Cross-Roads: African American Spirituality, Clinical Trials, and Patient-Subject Decision-Making(2015-04-24) Laws, Terri; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Howard Ecklund, ElainePublished assessments of religion and health scholarship observe the substantial need for the study of African American spirituality, and that what is available has implicated this cultural production as helpful and supportive of good health yet inhibitive in end-of-life decision making. This qualitative study from semi-structured interviews with African American prostate cancer patients finds spirituality as helpful to sustaining patients in their decisions to risk medical research although patients determine their decision to accept risk based on their understanding of the medical science presented to them. They are comforted by the agency available to them through bioethical principles and practices, most notably, informed consent. The findings of this study contest the centrality of the Tuskegee narrative popularly believed to be inhibitive to African American clinical trial participation as well as the over-simplification of the relationship between religion and African Americans’ cancer fatalism widely held among members of the health professions. The study acknowledges that structural issues prevent too many African Americans from access to the option of clinical trial participation. Two constructs are offered: a cultural sociological approach (Jeffrey Alexander; Gordon Lynch) to re-imagining Tuskegee as a sacred rhetoric, and a sociological approach to risk acceptance and risk taking referencing institutionalized religion; both constructs are derived from Durkheimian theory. These solutions are offered as responses to the data that emerged through the qualitative research and existing treatments of religion and health in African American religious scholarship. This study suggests that there is a shifting paradigm in which more African Americans will merge their spirituality with scientific knowledge to increase medical research participation with the long term aim of reducing health disparities. In turn, additional theoretical frameworks will emerge beyond the closed loop epistemology inherent in Durkheim’s theory. The research agenda begun here points to implications for theory and practice in fields including African American Religions, pastoral theology, health policy, health services, and bioethics.Item Comparative Analysis of Gift Exchange among a Pentecostal Christian Denomination and an Indigenous Religious Tradition in Ile-Ife, Nigeria(2014-01-27) Gbadegesin, Enoch; Bongmba, Elias K.; Pinn, Anthony B.; Faubion, James D.This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the gift and how it impacts on interpersonal relationship among the Yoruba of Nigeria. The dissertation examines gift exchange as it is practiced among the worshippers of Ògún deity usually commemorated as an annual Olójó festival in comparison with Christ Way Church International a member of Pentecostal Charismatic group in Ilé-Ifè. In particular, the dissertation analyses a) the gift, its definition and the theoretical propositions by the anthropologists and sociologists and the principles that govern its practice; b) ethnographically, the Yoruba experience and expression of the gift, at the social, political, economic and ritual levels of interaction among immediate group and with other group of people; c) the patterns of interpersonal relationship that exists between the Òrìsà worshippers and Pentecostal Charismatic Christians using the two focused religious groups in Ilé-Ifè as test case; d) how gift exchange practices can be means of creating and maintaining boundaries, and how that can lead to identity formation between different religious groups; in short how gift and reciprocity can be means of exclusion by bringing Annette Weiner’s Inalienable Possessions in conversation with Marcel Mauss’s The Gift; e) the different senses and contexts in which the religious groups can use gift exchange practices to bring about solidarity and harmony in the Yorùbá society.Item Pneumoeroticism: An Erotic Hermeneutic of Body and Spirit in Ghanaian Pentecostalism(2018-06-07) Homewood, Nathanael J.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Kripal, Jeffrey J.Relying on ethnographic data from 8 months of fieldwork in Accra, Ghana, my dissertation examines the centrality of sex and sexuality in Pentecostal deliverance. In particular, turning to the senses, it demonstrates how the ubiquity of sex and sexuality in deliverance is vital to the Pentecostal view of body and spirit and the relationship between those entities. From a masturbating man, to the spirits of lesbianism, to sexual experiences with spirits and spirit animals, sex is used to expand the definition of the body beyond its fleshy boundaries and to make spirits immanent. To capture interpret these sexualized phenomenon, the dissertation concludes by offering a hermeneutic that I call pneumoeroticism.Item Re-imagining race and representation: The black body in the Nation of Islam(2009) Finley, Stephen Carl; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.As a project located in the academic field of the study of African American religion, this dissertation examines the black body in four critical moments of the Nation of Islam (NOI), represented by the ministries of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan. Defined as the material locus of the self and the site of the symbolization of a given collective culture and cosmology, the project argues that the body was the central concern in all four moments in their religious efforts to re-imagine, reform, and re-present bodies that they perceived had been distorted, disfigured, and devalued by racist violence, discourses, and oppression in America. The research contends that the NOI was only partially "successful" in its reformative efforts to reconstitute and valorize black bodies. Utilizing the hermeneutical frameworks of critical social theory, which includes psychoanalysis, philosophy of embodiment (phenomenology) and race, and a theory and method based approach to the study of religion in its analysis and interpretation, the project suggests that the NOI may have internalized many of the dynamics and values of white supremacy and, as a consequence, re-produced and re-deployed its own system of intra-"race" marginalization and hierarchical classification within the NOI and in the greater African American community. Such discrimination was predicated upon an ideal black bodily economy that ranked bodies based on indicators such as gender, sexuality, and skin complexion. As a result of having co-opted middle-class American and African American values and practices, the research concludes that the NOI converted problematic issues of "race" into an ambiguous and indeterminate class system in their response to the exigencies of the conditions of existence for African Americans. The research suggests both the need for greater attention to the body in African American religious studies, analyses of the co-constitutive elements of class, gender, race, and sexuality, and for reflexive consideration of the ways in which systems of domination may be socially reproduced and/or disrupted by marginalized collectivities.Item The Moorish Science Temple of America: A Study Exploring the Foundations of African American Islamic Thought and Culture(2013-09-16) Easterling, Paul; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Emerson, Michael O.One of the reasons religious studies is important to the academic process is because it seeks to understand the intricacies of well known human systems of meaning. Also important is research on those religious systems not well known. Herein lies the purpose of this dissertation, to exam a religious movement within the African American community, which has not received the academic attention it deserves, the Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc. (MSTA). Therefore, the primary thesis for this dissertation: to expand the current study of African American Islam to include the intricacies of the movement and organization of the MSTA through attention to primary materials and secondary literature.Item “The Saints Go Marching”: The Church of God in Christ and the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, 1954-1968(2014-04-25) Chism, Jonathan; Pinn, Anthony B.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Boles, John B.Having assumed black Pentecostals are “otherworldly” or detached from politics and this-worldly concerns, many religious and civil rights scholars have ignored black Holiness-Pentecostals’ involvements in the Civil Rights Movement and instead focused on the roles of black Baptists and Methodists. Primarily guided by historical, sociological, theo-ethical, and hermeneutical methods, this dissertation examines Church of God in Christ (COGIC) members’ engagements in the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, 1954-1968. I chose Memphis as the location to examine these assumptions because the most renowned Civil Rights leader, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his last sermon at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the headquarters of the largest and oldest black holiness-Pentecostal denomination. The dissertation argues that Memphis COGIC members were not divorced from the Memphis Movement but endeavored to combat racial injustice and inequality through a diversity of means, including through politics, nonviolent direct action, and spiritual quest. I contend that despite being marginalized and treated as outsiders on account of their race and religious faith, prior to the Civil Rights Movement early saints affirmed their identity as United States citizens, valued American democratic ideas of freedom and equality, and endeavored to advance democratic principles through participating in civic life. Additionally, when the Civil Rights Movement came to Memphis in the 1950s, COGIC members joined and worked alongside black church leaders from other denominations and engaged in nearly every aspect of the struggle, including political campaigns, desegregation efforts, and the Sanitation Workers Strike. Furthermore, I argue that Holiness-Pentecostal theology informed the activism of Memphis COGIC Civil Rights activists. Affirming his Holiness-Pentecostal heritage, Bishop J.O. Patterson Sr., a prominent Memphis Civil Rights activist, sought to persuade blacks in general and to remind black Christian activists in particular of the indispensability of spiritual presence and empowerment for social struggle. My research findings provoke scholars of religion to rethink the meaning and implications of otherworldliness. Additionally, this research indicates that there is greater complexity to black churches involvement in the Civil Rights Movement besides the contributions of black Baptists and Methodists.Item What Mystics May Come: Forming More Perfect Unions from Pragmatism to Posthumanism(2013-12-05) Pevateaux, Chad; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Bongmba, Elias K.; Wolfe, CaryAt the turn of the twentieth century, after the American Civil War but before the World Wars, William James and others drew on the wisdom of the World’s religious traditions, especially the “mystical languages of unsaying,” to construct the modern category of mysticism in part to provide a common core around which divided peoples might rally in the hopes of forming a more perfect union both religiously and politically. Over one hundred years later, postmodern theorists turn to unknowingness at the heart of our most cherished knowledge of ourselves and our world as a resource rather than a threat to aid in our efforts to honor others. My dissertation examines such recent appropriations of ancient unsaying, but moves beyond the merely linguistic and logical to analyze the embodied and emplaced through comparing what I call mystical and mundane modes of undoing, such as Jamesian pragmatic participation in a pluralistic universe (Chapter 1); orthodox and heterodox, Eastern and Western embodiments of cosmic vibrations from ancient gnosis, through Christian mystical theology, to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry (Chapter 2); the yearning for more life meaning in African American religiosity represented by Howard Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Sojourner Truth (Chapter 3); and democratic theorizing from feminists to posthumanists (Chapter 4). With creative collisions of apparently disparate thinkers who nevertheless share similar dynamics of embracing “spiritual but not religious” practices, I seek to move discussions of the mystical forward through developing resources for understanding and transforming dynamics of oppression such as gender, race, class, species, and other issues of embodied difference. Using Jacques Derrida as a bridge figure, I counter what I call the linguistic misread of deconstruction to advocate for more aware participation in an embodied mode of experiencing a generative vulnerability that is absolutely universal. Understood anew, embodied finitude may provide resources for promoting justice by uniting around a different kind of common core—a common core of no common core. Indeterminateness, then, may mean daring to unknow ourselves and our others through participation in a mystery beyond clear cut divisions—immanent and transcendent, material and immaterial, male and female, human and animal.