Faith, Secular Humanism, and Development: A Reading of Jacques Roumain’s Religious Sensibility and Marxist Rhetoric
Celucien L. Joseph
celucien_joseph@yahoo.com
Excerpt
“This essay investigates the intersections of religion, social transformation, and Marxist social theory in the thought of Jacques Roumain. It argues that Roumain’s radical perspective on religion and development, and his critiques of institutionalized Christianity, were substantially influenced by a Marxist conception of historical materialism and secular humanist approach to faith and human progress. Roumain rejects Christianity for its ineffective societal role in fostering social change. This essay also contends that Roumain’s rejection of religious supernaturalism and divine intervention in human affairs and history was shaped by his non-theistic humanism and secular worldview on faith. Ultimately, the essay demonstrates that Roumain believes that only through effective human solidarity and collaboration can serious social transformation and real human freedom take place. He downplays the potential role of religion to deal adequately with the ambiguities of life in this world. Roumain holds that man is the measure of all things and his own agent of liberation. Consequently, individuals themselves must cooperate and unite in order to alter the social order toward a fruitful life of peace, harmony, and freedom.”
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Dr. Celucien L. Joseph is an adjunct Professor of English Language and Literature at Palm Beach State College. Professor Joseph is interested in the intersections of history, race, religion, literature, and cultural identity. He is the author of the new book, Race, Religion, and the Haitian Revolution: Essays on Faith, Freedom, and Decolonization. He is presently working on several forthcoming books: Religious Métissage: The Religious Imagination and ideas of Jean Price-Mars (under contract with Wipf & Stock), Faith, Secular Humanism, and Social Development: Jacques Roumain’s Engagements With Religion and Critical Theory (under contract with University Press of America), and “The Haitian Turn”: Haiti, the Black Atlantic, and Black Transnational Consciousness (under contract with The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd).
His academic research and teaching interests include Black Internationalism; Francophone Studies: Africa and the Caribbean; African American Literature, African Cultural and Intellectual History; Comparative Literature of the African Diaspora; Postcolonial and Critical Theory; African American Religion; African Religions in the Diaspora; Liberation and Constructive Theologies.
Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine.
Areas of Interest and Research:
African American Religious Studies
Africana Philosophy
African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought
African American Intellectual History
Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought
Philosophies of Liberation
Contemporary Religious Thought
Race, Gender, and American Christianities
Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms
Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas
(Christian) Social Ethics
Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy
Theories of Race, Gender, and Power
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.
Dr. Celucien L. Joseph is an adjunct Professor of English Language and Literature at Palm Beach State College. Professor Joseph is interested in the intersections of history, race, religion, literature, and cultural identity. He is the author of the new book, Race, Religion, and the Haitian Revolution: Essays on Faith, Freedom, and Decolonization. He is presently working on several forthcoming books: Religious Métissage: The Religious Imagination and ideas of Jean Price-Mars (under contract with Wipf & Stock), Faith, Secular Humanism, and Social Development: Jacques Roumain’s Engagements With Religion and Critical Theory (under contract with University Press of America), and “The Haitian Turn”: Haiti, the Black Atlantic, and Black Transnational Consciousness (under contract with The Edwin Mellen Press Ltd).
