NY: Simon & Schuster. Joshi, Khyati Y. 2020. White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Relig... more NY: Simon & Schuster. Joshi, Khyati Y. 2020. White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Kellstedt, Lyman A., and James L Guth. 2018. “Survey Research: Religion and Electoral Behavior in the United States, 1936–2016.” In Political Science Research in Practice, edited by Akon Malici, and Elizabeth S. Smith, 2nd ed., 93–110. New York, NY: Routledge. Kinder, Donald R., and Lynn M Sanders,. 1996. Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Melkonian-Hoover, Ruth, and Lyman A Kellstedt,. 2019. Evangelicals and Immigration: Fault Lines Among the Faithful. Cham. CH: Palgrave Macmillan. Muhammad, Khalil G. 2010. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schäfer, Axel R. 2011. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Wong, Janelle. 2018. “The Evangelical Vote and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 3 (1): 81–106.
Maryknoll Catholic missionaries from the United States settled in Peru in 1943 believing they cou... more Maryknoll Catholic missionaries from the United States settled in Peru in 1943 believing they could save a "backward"Catholic Church from poverty, a scarcity of clergy, and the threat of communism. Instead, the missionaries found themselves transformed: within twenty-five years, they had become vocal critics of United States foreign policy and key supporters of liberation theology, the preferential option for the poor, and intercultural Catholicism. In The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943-1989, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens explains this transformation and Maryknoll's influence in Peru and the United States by placing it in the context of a transnational encounter Catholics with shared faith but distinct practices and beliefs. Peru received among the greatest number of foreign Catholic missionaries who settled in Latin America during the Cold War. It was at the heart of liberation theology and progressive Catholicism, the center of a radical reformist experiment in...
February and March have been especially brutal months in the state-sponsored repression of the po... more February and March have been especially brutal months in the state-sponsored repression of the popular resistance in Honduras. In just the past two weeks, three journalists have been assassinated…
Abstract:The United States Catholic Church has played an underappreciated role in U.S. foreign po... more Abstract:The United States Catholic Church has played an underappreciated role in U.S. foreign policy, especially in Latin America. U.S. Catholics entered the global stage during World War I by serving in the military and organizing the National Catholic War Council (later the National Catholic Welfare Conference [NCWC]) to facilitate dissemination of aid to American soldiers and European refugees. This effort was encouraged by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and supplemented by other domestic efforts. This article traces the development of U.S. Catholic international assistance and argues that it provided the foundation for a much more expansive civil-Catholic collaboration that evolved during the John F. Kennedy Administration. Neither the Catholic Church nor the U.S. government controlled the mutually reinforcing relationship. Instead, it grew as each looked to the other to extend foreign aid, especially during the era of the Cold War when opposing the spread of communism was a defining goal of both church and state.
gized its transatlantic reach” (558). Along with accolades duly lavished, historians will also fi... more gized its transatlantic reach” (558). Along with accolades duly lavished, historians will also find reasons for critique. Despite the book’s Atlantic world scope, the author’s lens maintains a U.S. historical outlook. The chronology centralizes a U.S. periodization, and the in-depth focus on the U.S. Civil Rights struggle during the long twentieth century loses sight of multiple events taking place abroad. The reader may wonder, for example, how African Methodists reacted to multiple U.S. occupations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as the Cuban Revolution. A greater engagement with key works on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism, especially recent books by Sylvester Johnson, Tisa Wenger, and Melani McAlister, may have engendered a more pointed challenge to U.S. blacks’ primacy in the organization. Citations to recent research on AME missions by Elisabeth Engel, Brandi Hughes, and Christina C. Davidson would have also supported the contributions of chapters 3 and 4. Critical engagement with the AME Church’s historical missionary newspaper, the Voice of Missions, and the AME Church’s Missionary Department archive and Llewellyn L. Berry Papers housed at the Schomburg Center in New York—as well as other public archives, including those located at the AME Church’s educational institutions—would have also enriched the narrative. A comprehensive list of these resources alongside the itemization of Dickerson’s personal archive provided in the bibliography would have generated a valuable register of AME archival resources. A brief authorial reflection upon the incomplete state of said public resources would have underscored the weight of Dickerson’s private treasure trove. Still, on the topic of sources, there is yet another point to be praised. To readers’ benefit, Dickerson treats contemporary essays published in the Christian Recorder and the AME Church Review as valuable primary and secondary sources and thus legitimizes the scholarship found therein. The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History is, by far, the best history of the AME Church to date. Its in-depth analysis of rare primary sources supports an indisputable thesis. The author is uniquely positioned to write expertly on AME Church history and has done his job well. In short, Dickerson’s history is a masterful piece of scholarship that, despite its historiographical blind spots, will continue to inspire both students of African Methodism and scholars of religion for generations to come.
As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think t... more As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear . . . Such evasiveness serves as a license to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (May 24, 2015), 59.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2015
The Association of Communitarian Health Services (ASECSA) is a transnational, religiously influen... more The Association of Communitarian Health Services (ASECSA) is a transnational, religiously influenced health program in Central America created during the Cold War. ASECSA was founded in 1978 by a small group of international health professionals with ties to programs started by Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity in Guatemala’s western highlands in the 1960s. It introduced a model of healthcare in which Maya health promoters and midwives became partners in healing rather than objects to be cured. Support for the health programs and ASECSA came from secular and religious international agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), German Misereor, Catholic Relief Services, and the World Council of Churches. ASECSA was founded to disseminate knowledge of popular health education strategies used by health promoters and midwives to provide preventive and curative medical services to their communities. The education methods grew from Paulo Freire...
NY: Simon & Schuster. Joshi, Khyati Y. 2020. White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Relig... more NY: Simon & Schuster. Joshi, Khyati Y. 2020. White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Kellstedt, Lyman A., and James L Guth. 2018. “Survey Research: Religion and Electoral Behavior in the United States, 1936–2016.” In Political Science Research in Practice, edited by Akon Malici, and Elizabeth S. Smith, 2nd ed., 93–110. New York, NY: Routledge. Kinder, Donald R., and Lynn M Sanders,. 1996. Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Melkonian-Hoover, Ruth, and Lyman A Kellstedt,. 2019. Evangelicals and Immigration: Fault Lines Among the Faithful. Cham. CH: Palgrave Macmillan. Muhammad, Khalil G. 2010. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schäfer, Axel R. 2011. Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Wilkerson, Isabel. 2010. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Wong, Janelle. 2018. “The Evangelical Vote and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 3 (1): 81–106.
Maryknoll Catholic missionaries from the United States settled in Peru in 1943 believing they cou... more Maryknoll Catholic missionaries from the United States settled in Peru in 1943 believing they could save a "backward"Catholic Church from poverty, a scarcity of clergy, and the threat of communism. Instead, the missionaries found themselves transformed: within twenty-five years, they had become vocal critics of United States foreign policy and key supporters of liberation theology, the preferential option for the poor, and intercultural Catholicism. In The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943-1989, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens explains this transformation and Maryknoll's influence in Peru and the United States by placing it in the context of a transnational encounter Catholics with shared faith but distinct practices and beliefs. Peru received among the greatest number of foreign Catholic missionaries who settled in Latin America during the Cold War. It was at the heart of liberation theology and progressive Catholicism, the center of a radical reformist experiment in...
February and March have been especially brutal months in the state-sponsored repression of the po... more February and March have been especially brutal months in the state-sponsored repression of the popular resistance in Honduras. In just the past two weeks, three journalists have been assassinated…
Abstract:The United States Catholic Church has played an underappreciated role in U.S. foreign po... more Abstract:The United States Catholic Church has played an underappreciated role in U.S. foreign policy, especially in Latin America. U.S. Catholics entered the global stage during World War I by serving in the military and organizing the National Catholic War Council (later the National Catholic Welfare Conference [NCWC]) to facilitate dissemination of aid to American soldiers and European refugees. This effort was encouraged by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and supplemented by other domestic efforts. This article traces the development of U.S. Catholic international assistance and argues that it provided the foundation for a much more expansive civil-Catholic collaboration that evolved during the John F. Kennedy Administration. Neither the Catholic Church nor the U.S. government controlled the mutually reinforcing relationship. Instead, it grew as each looked to the other to extend foreign aid, especially during the era of the Cold War when opposing the spread of communism was a defining goal of both church and state.
gized its transatlantic reach” (558). Along with accolades duly lavished, historians will also fi... more gized its transatlantic reach” (558). Along with accolades duly lavished, historians will also find reasons for critique. Despite the book’s Atlantic world scope, the author’s lens maintains a U.S. historical outlook. The chronology centralizes a U.S. periodization, and the in-depth focus on the U.S. Civil Rights struggle during the long twentieth century loses sight of multiple events taking place abroad. The reader may wonder, for example, how African Methodists reacted to multiple U.S. occupations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as the Cuban Revolution. A greater engagement with key works on religion, race, and U.S. imperialism, especially recent books by Sylvester Johnson, Tisa Wenger, and Melani McAlister, may have engendered a more pointed challenge to U.S. blacks’ primacy in the organization. Citations to recent research on AME missions by Elisabeth Engel, Brandi Hughes, and Christina C. Davidson would have also supported the contributions of chapters 3 and 4. Critical engagement with the AME Church’s historical missionary newspaper, the Voice of Missions, and the AME Church’s Missionary Department archive and Llewellyn L. Berry Papers housed at the Schomburg Center in New York—as well as other public archives, including those located at the AME Church’s educational institutions—would have also enriched the narrative. A comprehensive list of these resources alongside the itemization of Dickerson’s personal archive provided in the bibliography would have generated a valuable register of AME archival resources. A brief authorial reflection upon the incomplete state of said public resources would have underscored the weight of Dickerson’s private treasure trove. Still, on the topic of sources, there is yet another point to be praised. To readers’ benefit, Dickerson treats contemporary essays published in the Christian Recorder and the AME Church Review as valuable primary and secondary sources and thus legitimizes the scholarship found therein. The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History is, by far, the best history of the AME Church to date. Its in-depth analysis of rare primary sources supports an indisputable thesis. The author is uniquely positioned to write expertly on AME Church history and has done his job well. In short, Dickerson’s history is a masterful piece of scholarship that, despite its historiographical blind spots, will continue to inspire both students of African Methodism and scholars of religion for generations to come.
As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think t... more As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear . . . Such evasiveness serves as a license to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (May 24, 2015), 59.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2015
The Association of Communitarian Health Services (ASECSA) is a transnational, religiously influen... more The Association of Communitarian Health Services (ASECSA) is a transnational, religiously influenced health program in Central America created during the Cold War. ASECSA was founded in 1978 by a small group of international health professionals with ties to programs started by Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity in Guatemala’s western highlands in the 1960s. It introduced a model of healthcare in which Maya health promoters and midwives became partners in healing rather than objects to be cured. Support for the health programs and ASECSA came from secular and religious international agencies, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), German Misereor, Catholic Relief Services, and the World Council of Churches. ASECSA was founded to disseminate knowledge of popular health education strategies used by health promoters and midwives to provide preventive and curative medical services to their communities. The education methods grew from Paulo Freire...
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Papers by Susan Fitzpatrick