African-American Religion  

Easter Procession at a black church in Chicago, 1941

Library of Congress

Welcome to the LibGuide for African-American Religion!  The purpose of this guide is to support research by students in Yale Divinity School's concentration in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and others doing research in the history of African American religious traditions and theology. 

This is a selective guide to resources which are annotated so as to provide an idea of their usefulness.  They are organized into six categories.  Within each category, they are roughly sorted in order of coverage, from general to specific.

Encyclopedias are useful for exploratory research on particular topics.  In most cases the entries in the encyclopedias represented here include a selected bibliopgrahy for further reading.

Anthologies of primary sources and critical essays on particular topics in African-American religion.

Bibliographies of sources, both primary and secondary, books and articles as well as archival materials, on African-American religion or selected topics.  Note that these become obsolete immediately upon publication, but they can still be useful, particularly for historical research.

Websites with freely accessible resources about African-American religion.

Journals include periodicals dedicated to topics in Black Religion, as well as more general publications on African-American studies that include some articles and book reviews about religion.

Databases are available to Yale-affiliated users.  While ATLA and other religion databases may be your usual first stop for research on religion, there are other online indexes that may be more useful for research in African-American religion.

Hyperlinks and/or library locations are provided for each item.  When an item is availale in the Divinity Library, that location is listed first; however, some resources are only available online or at Bass or Sterlining Memorial (SML) Libraries on Yale's main campus.

The Yale Divinity Library would like to thank Juliet Crawford Schwab, a library science student at Syracuse University, who contributed much of the content of this libguide. 

This is a work in progress, so please feel free to contribute your feedback!