A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History.

When I was growing up, I was acutely aware that I was, for most of my school years, the only black child in my class and, except for my brothers and sisters, the only black child in my Catholic school. And I sometimes wondered whether there were others elsewhere in the same situation.

There were. Albert J. Raboteau was one of them. "Up North [in Ann Arbor, Michigan]," he writes, "black Catholics were few. I was one of a handful of black students in Saint Thomas School. I didn't say it, but I felt different, alone, far from my people, far from home."

Perhaps it is just the projection of one who sees exceptional similarities between aspects of Raboteau's life and his own, but I have the sense that this book is an effort by the author to find his way home, to go back in some fashion to grandma's house in the Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, of his childhood:

In Bay Saint Louis, unlike the North, there always seemed to be time and space enough for the long-time love. In the evening twilight, we gathered for supper. The table was heavy with food, laughter, and stories, stories about the old people that went on long into the night, until the last warm sweet sip of anisette placed a benediction on the evening....There was no rush about them, as with the people up North. They attended carefully to the daily tasks of community. Graciousness with others, gentleness, generosity, care, kindness, politeness--these were the virtues of my people, patterns that healed. These were my people. They had an ease about them that put others at ease, like a warm embrace.

If this seems to have nothing to do with African-American religion, that is absolutely right--and completely wrong. In the narrow, academic sense, it does have nothing to do with religion. But in the broadest, fullest sense--the only meaningful one--it has everything to do with religion. Supper, stories, healing, "the long-time love" and "the daily tasks of community"--those are central to religion, or at least to Christian religion.

And without reading too much into him, it seems safe to say that Raboteau feels that these--especially the healing and the building and maintaining of community--have been special concerns in African-American religion, if only because they were so badly needed.

This book actually is at least two books. The larger consists of nine essays, most of which have previously been published elsewhere. They vary widely in character, from a brief, almost journalistic explanation of new trends in African-American religion over the last half-century, to a scholarly explication of what might be called African-American Christian theology, to an intriguing discussion of the points of convergence between the thought of Thomas Merton and that of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Raboteau, a professor of religion and former dean of graduate studies at Princeton, is a first-rate academic and probably the pre-eminent scholar of African-American religious history in the nation. So what he writes in these essays is solid, bankable.

Simply in terms of filling a personal informational gap, I found invaluable the essay "Richard Allen and the African Church Movement," about the founder and first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal church. In terms of timeliness, the three reflections on "African-American religion and American destiny" were especially helpful in illuminating the recent decision of the Southern Baptist Convention to formally apologize for its acquiescence in the orginal American sin of slavery.

The second book comprises the prologue and the epilogue. These two short pieces appear to have been composed explicitly for this publication, to try to give some coherence to the essays and justify their appearance in a single volume.

To be perfectly frank, they don't do that. In the end the bok feels like what it is--a collection of disparate writings, all having generally to do with African-American religion but not really constituting a single argument or expressing some grand, overarching idea.

But to say that the prologue and epilogue don't work for their intended purpose is not to say that they don't work.

The prologue is as fine a defense of multiculturalism in education as I have ever read. It is largely an implicit defense, flowing out of a discussion of the tension between the demands of the historian's discipline and religious faith. But Raboteau is, at certain points, quite explicit, as, for example, when he asserts:

In the absence of black history, a myth of the American past developed, a myth that denied black people any past of significance....The recovery of African-American history served as a paradigm for the recovery of the pasts of other people whose stories had also been left out of American history.

The epilogue is less easily described. It might best be called a sermon--about the importance and possibilities of history, both personal and national, for healing our fractured national community.

Having recalled and reflected on episodes from his own personal history, like the one above about Bay Saint Louis, Raboteau observes: "Our nation too has ancestors. Now, as much as ever, we stand in need of their presence....Memory, story, ritual--these are all ways of remembering a community broken by hate, rage, injustice, fear. Not to avenge, nor to make up for, not undoing what can't be done, but perhaps to heal."

If for nothing more than this sermon, Raboteau deserves to be read.