June 01, 2006

Grading papers again...

I'm still buried under papers, but here's a striking statistic worth lifting out of this paper and sharing more widely: "By virtue of their voluntary nature and the separation of church and state, religious congregations largely remain segregated by race. For example, according to the National Congregations Study, nearly 90 percent of American congregations are at least 90 percent one racial group, and nearly 80 percent of congregations are at least 95 percent one racial group (Chaves, 1998). This means that despite the racial integration that has been occurring in other institutions, the vast majority of more than 300,000 religious congregations in the Unites States, the largest and most active of voluntary societies, surround themselves with members who are of the same race (Emerson & Kim, 2003). This trend is generational in nature. It is difficult to change the historical patterns of deference and expectations of privilege deeply embedded in our cultural bones (Foster, 1997, p. xiv). "

It may be difficult, but I believe that God demands that we try!

Posted by hessma at June 1, 2006 12:50 PM
Comments

Yup, MLK's comment about the most segregated hour of the week is still true...

A good book (which some local church people are reading and which a couple of my undergrads read also in an independent study) is Michael Battle and Tony Campolo's _The Church Enslaved: A Spirituality of Racial Reconciliation_. (Michael spoke here in November, too, right before Desmond Tutu.) A must-read. (Along with Beverly Daniel Tatum's _Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?_ which is not about church but which everyone should read, especially White people.)

Good luck with papers... We had that rush to the finish in the first week in May. Still recovering! Some of us on the faculty actually had to pull an all-nighter right before the deadline because the grades were due so fast.

Peace,
Jane

Posted by: Jane Redmont at June 1, 2006 06:35 PM