March 6, 2007
While reading Linda's notes on and Eckson's partial transcript of the interview with Pastor Grattan, I came to think about:

  1. the term "program" as a church activity that Grattan did relate to questions about education but in a way that bears more examination: are the two synonymous within the world of the church? or is there a hint of another distinction? From our point of view, of course, a "program for young adults" is an educational activity. But we should still keep in mind the possible attempt to make a distinction.
  2. Talking about a distinction: we have here the beginning of the ethnographic challenge against the distinction formal/informal that has gotten to interest me. The situation, I expected, would be shown to be more complex than the school-based/non-school based dichotomy. Grattan's church, as another formal, as well as informal, organization is a complex of educational settings each, I suspect with somewhat different properties.
    1. sermons and Sunday schools focusing on teaching/interpreting the faith
    2. "programs" delivering a service that is, to a large extent, a matter of teaching/explaining/interpreting the world with competing views of "the good life" (not Magic Johnson, Elvis Presley or hip-hop?)
    3. conversations about current events held either within the confines of sermons/programs or outside these confines (e.g. talk about Columbia's expansion including political issues, environmental matters, city planning, etc.)

Thinking further as I write this, I notice that Grattan did not in fact speak about matters of faith (Jesus, the Gospels, etc.). This has to be the product of the "interview with representatives from the university" setting leading to an emphasis on the secular, or the translation of the religious into the secular (e.g. Grattan describing his church as being identified as "conservative" [did he ever say "we are conservative"?]

May 15, 2007

As I was walking around, taking more pictures of the churches in census tracts 206 & 208, and in the context of starting to write "'When' is education," I got to think that churches are moments/places (rather than institutions) when people deliberate about their conditions, consider possibilities, and enact practically some of these. This could be said of course of every other moments/places (institutions) but there is a price to pay for focusing solely on what most common sensically characterizes churches--that they are, as it is now polite to say, "faith-based" as if this was not true also of all other settings, including public schools. What may distinguish churches, experientially, is a set of discourses that will not be found elsewhere but are also discourses of deliberation. In other words, a church is a place where one can talk/converse in a way that one may not use in other settings. The same issue might be raised for deliberation (let's say, the good life and the pursuit of happiness...) but the consequentialities of the talk, the modes of control, are completely different. Particularly in a context like Harlem a church may be one of the few settings where control is more fully located with a local "congregation" (using the word both in its religious and ethnomethodological sense). A small church is thus a speech act, an embodiment, by the individual(s) who found it, as well as a directly participatory setting for those who may "join" it or who may be "the flock." That is, even the internal differentiations in authority patterns are most directly controlled by members who can (and I am sure do) leave at any time.

This is why we need examples of the religious history of pastors and the laity (or whatever distinctions are made in participants' discourses), as well as histories of the churches themselves which we would analyze as long conversations (deliberations).

June 1, 2007

A first approximation of the number of churches in our main census tracts is 31 for a population of 17,170. I still have to work the northern parts of 212 and 210. This probably will not change much the average of around 550 per church. Note that there are no churches in 210 which appears to be filled with housing developments (Lincoln Houses and Riverton). There are also few churches in 212, probably for the same reason (Lenox Houses). Of course, there is no reason to assume that the people of these developments go south to church (rather than east). But I suspect, again, that, once we have surveyed the tracts west of Lenox, we will get back to a similar average.

Given what is generally known about the religiosity of American Blacks, this is not surprising. What is surprising is how rarely this is discussed in the literature on inner-city education.

I find it interesting also that this average is not so distant from the rule of thumb I had gotten for Paw Paw at the time of my dissertation: 15 churches for 5,000 people. Note that there too, the average could only be indicative since the relevant population could not be clearly bounded, the smaller churches came and went, and their catchment areas did not overlap.