What a 2015 church burning reveals about race and American religious life: An interview with Professor Todne Thomas
Prof. Todne Thomas / photo by Mara Lavitt
In the new episode of the YDS “Quadcast,” Todne Thomas, Associate Professor of Divinity and Religious Studies, discusses her research on a Tennessee church burning and the value of ethnographic study of religious life in America.
“A lot of times when we hear information about U.S. religious life, so much of it is based on polls, which do a particular kind of work,” Thomas says, noting that polls lack nuance and often focus on political dimensions of faith. “Religious life is important, whether we’re in an election year or not.”
Listen to this episode on SoundCloud.
Todne Thomas is a socio-cultural anthropologist with joint appointment at Yale Divinity School and Yale College. In collaboration with Afro-Caribbean and African American congregants, Thomas conducts ethnographic research on the racial, spatial, and familial dynamics of Black Christian communities. Her scholarship and teaching explore intersectional constructions of power and critical forms of consciousness and practice that attend modalities of “the sacred.”
Her forthcoming book From Hate to Hallows: Re-framing Black Church Arson (contracted with Duke University Press) examines the burning of a predominately Black Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2015. She argues that Black church arson is an interpretive phenomenon that is best apprehended through local explanatory frameworks of religion, race, and hallowed ground.
The YDS Quadcast is hosted by Emily Judd ‘19 M.A.R., who is Senior Communications Specialist at the Higher Committee of Human Fraternity. She previously worked as a journalist in the Middle East.