Review: Casselberry, Judith. The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:

In The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism, Judith Casselberry, Associate Professor of African Studies at Bowdoin College, provides an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which women simultaneously support a gendered hierarchy and exercise their own power within an African-American Holiness-Pentecostal congregation. Although there have recently been a number of studies of African American Pentecostalism (see, for example, Peter Marina’s Getting the Holy Ghost: Urban Ethnography in a Brooklyn Pentecostal Tongue-Speaking Church [2013] and William Turner’s United Holy Church of America: Study in Black Holiness Pentecostalism [2006]), as well as multiple and powerful theological analyses of African-American women’s experience (see, for instance, M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being [2009]), Casselberry’s anthropological work fills a gap in focusing on the experience of African-American women within a particular denomination, the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ (COOLJC).