The Lived Theology and
Community Building Workgroup
Wallace Best
Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies (Harvard)
Professor Best's primary area of interest involves the intersection of migration, urbanization and African American religious culture. He explored these themes in his dissertation, "Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Racial Ideology and Religious Culture in the Black Churches of Chicago, 1915-1963." Other areas of interest include antebellum-era independent black churches, Black and "Womanist" theologies, the Social Gospel, black women religious leaders, Pentecostal and Holiness traditions, and the Nation of Islam.
Working within the fields of American and African American religious studies, Professor Best focuses his research and writing on the relationship between migration, urbanization, and religious transformation. His teaching has centered on the way social, cultural, and demographic shifts influence religious experience and practice. His latest work deals with gender and religion, the religious literature of the Harlem Renaissance, and global Pentecostalism, and seeks to place African American Pentecostalism within the context of the Pentecostal movement worldwide. Wallace Best came to Harvard Divinity School in 2004 after spending the 2003-04 academic year as a Fellow at Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton University Press, 2005). He has also worked on a number of public history projects, including two PBS documentaries, This Far by Faith and Soldiers Without Swords: The Black Press. In addition, he was co-curator of a photographic and manuscript exhibit on the life of Elder Lucy Smith, held at the Carter Woodson regional branch of the Chicago Public Library. Currently, he is working on a book of primary sources on the life of Elder Smith.