#  A Scholar-Activist Comes Full Circle at HDS 

 





November 17, 2015

 

 

It's hard to pin Albert Raboteau down.

Before earning his doctorate in religious history, he studied English literature and theology. Now, as a visiting professor at HDS, he's teaching a seminar on the intersection of literature and spirituality.

He's moved from the Deep South to the West Coast to the Northeast, and from Roman Catholicism to doubting faith to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. He's been a teacher, writer, and activist, and at different times he even considered becoming a monk or a community organizer.

"I would have been a horrible community organizer," he said, chuckling during a recent interview in the Rockefeller Café. "Teaching is truly my vocation."

Though Raboteau ended up as a professor, his scholarship and teaching have always been fed by his spirituality and activism.

Raboteau was born a Catholic, and, as a teenager, he came close to joining a monastery and pursuing a contemplative life. However, while he was still an undergraduate majoring in English at Loyola Marymount, his activist streak was awakened by the Second Vatican Council.

"Vatican II," he said, "showed that the role of the Church in the world was to help those who were poor, suffering, and oppressed."

Before graduating from Loyola, he helped start a tutoring program for high school students in the low-income Watts district of Los Angeles, an experience that further exposed Raboteau to the racial dimensions of inequality.

Even before he was born, though, Raboteau's life had been changed by racism. While his mother was pregnant with him in Mississippi, his father was shot by a white man who claimed self-defense. The killer was never charged with a crime. Raboteau's mother moved the family to California soon afterwards, where she remarried, but her son grew up with a consciousness of oppression that bore fruit in his later work.

After Loyola Marymount, Raboteau's interest in literature propelled him to Berkeley, where he went to earn a master's degree in English. He arrived at the height of the Free Speech movement and "spent as much time in the streets as in the libraries."

He also found that English at the graduate level tended to be more about criticism than the literature he loved, so, after finishing at Berkeley, he decided not to pursue a doctorate in that field.

Instead, doubts in his faith drove him to study theology at Marquette University, but he says that only exacerbated the problem. He found academic theology too disconnected from the personal experience of the holy.

Meanwhile, his activism continued unabated, and at Marquette he became one of the leaders of the Respond movement. The idea, he explained, "was to respond to the racial crisis in this country by trying to create a program that would increase the number of minority faculty and students. And out of that movement actually came an educational opportunity program. I went back years later to receive an honorary degree from Marquette, and I was greeted as one of the founders of this program. I said, 'I had no idea we actually succeeded!' "

“The class has been a microcosm of some of the best aspects of HDS: small, intimate classes, with engaged faculty and students committed to making the most of our time together.”

It was at this time that he thought about becoming a community organizer, but instead he went to teach at Xavier University in New Orleans, where he realized his true passion was for teaching.

"I just thrived on lecturing and on working with students with inquisitive minds," he said.

Finally sure of his calling, he decided the next step was a PhD, and he shifted academic tracks again when he went to Yale to study the history of religion. Though his field of study had changed, his commitment to social justice had not.

The book that developed from his dissertation, 1974's *Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South*, was part of a contemporary conversation about the place of black people in America.

"A lot of the Black Power movement was criticizing religion, particularly Christianity, as being retrograde in terms of freeing black people, which didn't feel right to me, so I wanted to do historical study on whether religion really did make them more docile," he said.

The act of researching firsthand accounts of former slaves was powerful for Raboteau, whose scholarship forms an important link between black Americans both past and present.

"I found that as I started writing about the slaves and their wisdom and experience, it was almost literally as if they were looking over my shoulder, speaking to me. I felt as if I were a channel of this neglected area of deep wisdom that not only my people needed to hear, but all Americans needed to hear. And since I fit into that generation of younger black scholars who were beginning to develop what became the field of African American studies, it was a very exiting time to be at Yale."

He brought this excitement to HDS as a young professor, where he taught his first class on the history of religion.

"It was while I was in New Haven writing *Slave Religion* that HDS professor [Preston Williams](http://hds.harvard.edu/people/preston-n-williams) invited me up to offer a seminar. So I took the train once a week from New Haven to Boston, I got here early enough to eat my lunch in this very place \[the Rock Café\], and I taught my course."

It was at HDS that Raboteau entered into his vocation of teaching as a mature scholar, poised to release a book that would make his reputation and help to shape the study of American religion. The immediate impact he had as a teacher is clear from the fact that more than one of his students in that initial seminar at HDS went on to teach in the field of black American religion.

Raboteau has had a long and successful career as professor of religion at Princeton, where he’s taught [since 1982](http://religion.princeton.edu/main/people/all-people/core-faculty/albert-raboteau/), and he feels his initial training in literature helps him as a historian.

"I think it's attuned me to listening to voices," he said.

His colleague Jeffrey Stout once told Raboteau that *Slave Religion* is written so that readers come into close contact with the subjects of the book, and that Raboteau's love for their voices is clear. His background in literature is probably also responsible for the sense of rhythm with which Raboteau writes—a quality sometimes lacking in academic prose.

 ![Albert Raboteau ](/sites/g/files/omnuum3891/files/hds/files/raboteau-news-inline.jpg)

 

His persistent interest in literature has also led him to offer occasional classes on the subject, one of which he's teaching this semester at HDS, called "Holy Ordinary: Religious Dimensions in Modern and Contemporary Fiction."

"We look at modern and contemporary fiction, augmented by some poetry and film, in which the sacred emerges in surprising and unusual ways out of often ordinary circumstances—circumstances where it's a shock to perceive the holiness in those situations."

He gives the example of a Flannery O'Connor story called "Parker's Back," in which a penchant for tattoos leads a man in a loveless marriage to an experience of suffering and redemption. The class's syllabus also includes authors such as William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and Manil Suri.

The course has been a hit with students like MDiv candidate David Waters, who welcomed the chance to read both familiar and unknown authors through a spiritual lens.

"The class has been a microcosm of some of the best aspects of HDS: small, intimate classes, with engaged faculty and students committed to making the most of our time together," Waters said.

Throughout his long and productive career, Raboteau has been good at closing circles in his life and finding ways to integrate interests and experiences that might seem unconnected at first glance, such as: spirituality and an academic career, scholarship and activism, loves of history and of literature, and an interest in the contemplative life and a vocation to teach out in the world.

Theoretically retired, Raboteau is not only teaching this semester, he's also completing a project that weaves together many of these threads. "Sharing the Divine Pathos" will be a textbook on the lives and voices of seven prophetic individuals who spoke from religious perspectives about social justice in twentieth-century America.

Though his weekly commute to Cambridge is even longer than the first time he taught here—from his home in Princeton rather than in New Haven—he sees a poetic justice in coming back.

"I decided now that I'm retired from full-time teaching that there is something fitting about coming full circle and returning to the place of my first teaching experience," he explained.

Difficult as it is to pin Raboteau down, HDS is fortunate to have him—once again—as a teacher.

*—by Walter Smelt*



 

 

 



 

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