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Passionately Human, No less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952. Wallace D. Best, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2005. xxii + 250 pp. (Cloth US$39.95)
Wallace Best's book reminds one of St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton's classic study of African Americans in Chicago, Black Metropolis (1962 [1945]), especially Best's emphasis on migration and reUgion. Yet there are significant differences. Best's work concentrates on the importance of reUgion as a catalyst for African American culture and gives a reUgious interpretation of the Great Northern Migration or Southern Exodus itself. Drake and Cayton's work was informed by the insights and methods of sociologists and anthropologists of urban Ufe, whereas Best's work as a historian of the reUgious Ufe shows how reUgion is a formative ingrethent of cultural Ufe among Chicago's African Americans.
Best places his work within two broad contexts: African American reUgion, and the City of Chicago's cultural geography and poUtical dynamics. The problematic nature of African American reUgion and migration during the mid-twentieth century serves as a methodological connection between these contexts, as was the case for Drake and Cayton. Although Best pays attention to mainline Protestant churches, Chicago's myriad "storefront" churches clearly Ue at the center of his work. To be sure, one could argue that a study of storefront churches is long overdue, but Best impUcitly makes a more important point.