{"id":22829,"date":"2025-10-27T08:55:33","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T12:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/?p=22829"},"modified":"2025-10-27T23:31:57","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T03:31:57","slug":"black-freedom-religious-excitement-and-the-invention-of-a-public-health-crisis-lecture-set-for-oct-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/2025\/10\/27\/black-freedom-religious-excitement-and-the-invention-of-a-public-health-crisis-lecture-set-for-oct-29\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Freedom, Religious Excitement and the Invention of a Public Health Crisis, lecture set for Oct. 29"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-22828\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/106\/2025\/09\/Judith-Weisenfeld.png?resize=276%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Headshot of Judith Weisenfeld\" width=\"276\" height=\"300\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\" \/>The <a href=\"https:\/\/chass.udmercy.edu\/news\/2025\/social-ethics\">2025 Bruttell Endowment for Social Ethics<\/a> presents &#8220;Black Freedom, Religious Excitement and the Invention of a Public Health Crisis,&#8221; a lecture by Judith Weisenfeld, the Agate Brown and George L. Collard Professor of Religion at Princeton University.<\/p>\n<p>This event will take place on <strong>Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 6:30 p.m.,<\/strong> in the Architecture Exhibition Space, inside the Loranger Architecture Building. The talk is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be available.<\/p>\n<p>Weisenfeld will examine the rise of mental institutions as public institutions in the late 19th Century and the increasing prominence of a racialized understanding of \u201creligious excitement\u201d as a public health crisis that served as justification for the institutionalization of the formerly enslaved and their descendants.<\/p>\n<p>Weisenfeld&#8217;s research and teaching focus on African American religious history, religion and race, and religion in modern American culture. She is the author most recently of <em>Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and American Psychiatry in Slavery&#8217;s Wake<\/em> and\u00a0<em>New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration<\/em>, which was awarded the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions. She is also the director of <em>The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Cultures, and Communities<\/em>, which is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and supported by Princeton\u2019s Center for Culture, Society and Religion.<\/p>\n<p>For any questions, please contact Chair of the Department of Religious Studies Todd Hibbard at <a href=\"mailto:hibbarja@udmercy.edu\">hibbarja@udmercy.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The event is co-sponsored by University of Detroit Mercy College of Humanities, Arts &amp; Social Sciences, the African American Studies Program and the Department of Religious Studies.<\/p>\n<h4><a href=\"https:\/\/www.eventbrite.com\/e\/black-freedom-and-religious-excitement-inventing-a-public-health-crisis-tickets-1689517084079?aff=oddtdtcreator\">Register here.<\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Attend this event entitled &#8220;Black Freedom, Religious Excitement and the Invention of a Public Health Crisis&#8221; on Oct. 29, in which Judith Weisenfeld, the Agate Brown and George L. Collard Professor of Religion at Princeton University, will explore how late 19th-century mental institutions used racialized views of \u201creligious excitement\u201d to justify institutionalizing formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":677,"featured_media":22828,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6,6438],"tags":[3824,6536,6164,6165,5128,93,7097,7098,6532],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/106\/2025\/09\/Judith-Weisenfeld.png?fit=276%2C300&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbwnTV-5Wd","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22829"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22829"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22881,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22829\/revisions\/22881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}