Department of Religious Studies

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Browsing Department of Religious Studies by Author "Curtis, Edward E., IV"

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    Science and Technology in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam
    (UC Press, 2016-08) Curtis, Edward E., IV; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This article explores the centrality of science and technology to religious thought and practice in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam from the 1950s through the 1970s. Tracing the dynamic meanings of scientific knowledge in the context of the postwar United States, the article’s central argument is that like other UFO and extraterrestrial religions, the Nation of Islam emphasized scientific, material, and empirical over spiritual and supernatural understandings of religion. It also suggests how members of this new religious movement studied and attempted to live according to the scientific and mathematical principles derived from their prophet’s cosmological, ontological, and eschatological teachings on the nature of God, the origins and destiny of the black race, and the beginning and end of white supremacy.
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    The Transnational and Diasporic Future of African American Religions in the United States
    (Oxford, 2019-06) Curtis, Edward E., IV; Johnson, Sylvester A.; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This article calls forth a vision for the future study of African American religions in the United States by examining how transnational contact and diasporic consciousness have affected the past practice and are likely to affect the future practice of Christianity, Islam, and African-derived, Orisha-based religions in Black America. It offers a synthesis of scholarly literature and charts possible directions for analyzing Africana religions beyond the ideological and geographical boundaries of the nation-state. The article focuses on two primary forms of imagined and physical movement: the immigration of self-identifying Black people from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico, and other places to the United States; and the travel, tourism, pilgrimage, and other movement—whether physical or not—of American-born Black people to places outside the Unites States.