INTERVIEW WITH DR. ALBERT RABOTEAU PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF RELIGION

Reprinted with permission from THE CHRISTIAN ACTIVIST, " A Journal of Orthodox Opinion" (Note: Headings were added to the original article to aid the reader).   Printer-Friendly Version

Dr. Raboteau is an African-American Professor and author at Princeton University, and a well-known authority on slave religion. He has two books, "Fire in the Bones" and "Slave Religion." He appeared in the recent PBS special on African-American Slavery, entitled "Africans in America."

Frank Schaeffer:   First, I want to ask you a couple of practical things. You're a professor at Princeton, but what is your actual title?

Albert Raboteau:   My actual title is the "Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion." I teach courses in American Religious History and a course on Religion and Literature. I've also developed a new course this semester called Spiritual Exercises, which is a seminar on some of the classics of Christian spirituality, both Christian East and Christian West.

FS:   How long have you been at Princeton?

AR:  I came to Princeton in 1982.

FS:   Did they hire you into your present position as a professor? Did you do graduate work there?

AR:  I did my graduate work at Yale and actually my first job offer was at Princeton but Yale also offered me a position, so I stayed at Yale. Then I moved from Yale to Berkeley and taught there for a number of years and did some administration there and then moved to Princeton on a visiting basis for a year in '81. I decided to stay and in '82 made the move.

FS:  When you moved to Princeton to assume your present duties, was this a change for you or was this something that you had anticipated in the sense that your own studies had led you to this field? Is this exactly what you'd studied for, what you're teaching?

AR:  Pretty much. That is, at Yale I studied American Religious History and specialized in African-American Religious history, writing a dissertation on the religion of slaves which was published as my first book called Slave Religion in 1977.

FS:   Who was the publisher?

AR:  Oxford University Press. It was a revision of my dissertation. When I went to Berkeley there was no Religious Studies department, so I taught in both the history department and the African-American studies department there and was involved in Religious studies. Part of my reason for moving to Princeton was I felt that being in a religious studies department would be a more suitable place in terms of colleagues who were involved in a common enterprise. I also moved to Princeton because I had gone to a very small university, Loyola in Los Angeles - now Loyola of Marymount - and that had set the image for me of the kind of teaching experience that I wanted. Berkeley, with 30,000 students was large and impersonal, a difficult place for me temperamentally although I loved the area in many ways. I also moved to Princeton because I was heading more and more into administration in Berkeley. My last two years there I was Associate Dean in charge of Student Advising in the College of Letters and Science, with 15,000 students. So I decided that Princeton would offer a chance for me to simply teach. Ironically within four years I was chair of the department there, which I did for four years and then I became Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton for one year and then resigned because I realized that this was really not what I wanted. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went back to full-time teaching and writing after that.

FS:   In your background, was there a point where you were studying to become a priest?

AR:  When I was high school age and even beyond, into college age, I thought about becoming a Roman Catholic priest and actually wanted to become a monk. When I was a high school senior I almost went into a Benedictine Monastery in New York. I graduated from high school when I was sixteen and decided that perhaps I was a little young to become a monk and that I ought to go to college. So I did, but I kept the idea of the priesthood and monastic life in mind so I majored in classics. Then as time went on the idea of the priesthood and monastic life seemed to recede. It didn't seem to be the path that I was heading down. Eventually, I majored in English and did my first graduate work in English at Berkeley. I did an MA. Then I decided to pursue my theological interests so I did two years of graduate work in Roman Catholic Theology at Marquette, and then taught theology for a year at a black college in New Orleans, Xavier. That experience convinced me that teaching was what I wanted to do and that teaching seemed to be my vocation. I then had to decide whether to go back to English or to continue with theology, and decided I wanted to do neither. I applied to Yale in Religious Studies in part because I heard of a professor there named Sidney Alstrom in the Study of American Religion who was quite eminent and quite broad in his interests, and also because Yale was beginning an African-American Studies program. It was an undergraduate program, but it indicated an interest in the area of African-American studies. I had decided that I really wanted to study the history of the religious life of black Americans as part of my interest in American Religion. I was particularly interested in the relationship between religion and the struggle for freedom of black people, so I applied to Yale and received a personal call from Sidney Alstrom encouraging me to come and so I did my graduate work there.

FS:   Do you see yourself staying where you are now?

AR:  At Princeton you mean?

FS:   Yes.

AR:  Well it's interesting because what I do has been changing slightly, that is both my writing and my teaching have taken more of a religious aspect. My last book, which was called Fire in the Bones , is a collection of essays.

FS:   Who's the publisher of Fire In The Bones ?

AR:  Beacon Press.

FS:   When did that book come out?

AR:  In 1995, and some of the essays in that volume are pretty much straight history - American religious history. Some of them are autobiographical and some of them are religious reflections. The sub-title of the book is Reflections on African-American Religious History . My interest in developing a course on Religion and Literature or Fantasy, plus this new course on Spiritual Exercises is a move in a different direction for me in terms of my teaching.

FS:   Before this interview, you mentioned that your course on Religious fantasy involved C. S. Lewis, of course, and J. R. Tolkein. Who else?

AR:  A number of other authors. We begin with some children's books: Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising . I wish we had time to read the whole series, but we don't, so we read the first volume. We also read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin and we read a wide range of Grimm's fairy tales. We also read a very strange but interesting science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick called The Divine Invasion.

FS:   Do you find the course is well received?

AR:  It is. I've had wonderful response from students. I actually have to restrict the enrollment by application.

FS:   So what are the other courses you're now teaching at Princeton?

AR:  There's the Spiritual Exercises course, a course on African-American Religious History, a course called American Classics , that I co-teach with a colleague named David Curasco in which we look at some historical texts and a number of fictional texts that deal with some of the large themes of American identity, The American Experience.

FS:   What sorts of writers are you teaching?

AR:  We read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner's The Bear, and we also read DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk . We read Leslie Mermin Silcoe, a Native American writer's book called Ceremony, and also Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior . We look at some of the classical texts such as the Declaration of Independence - both versions - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. We also reach back a little bit further. We look at a wonderful set of texts called Broken Spears, which is an attempt to get at the Aztec's account of the conquests.

FS:   Now, to get back at a couple of more basic questions, are you married?

AR:  Yes.

FS:   Do you have children?

AR:  I have four children. My first marriage failed and I remarried. My second wife has two grown children and I have four children by my first marriage. They stretch in age from my youngest who's 13 to my oldest who's 25.

FS:   So who's still at home?

AR:  The thirteen-year-old.

FS:   Boy or girl?

AR:  A boy named Martin and he's...I should mention that he's also Orthodox. He's the one of my children who became Orthodox and serves at our church.

FS:   She's an artist by background.

FS:   Artist as in "painter"?

AR:  Yes. She also did some performance art in days past. For the last twelve years she's been working with out-patient psychiatric patients in Harlem at a clinic, and she runs a large studio which is a basement room of this clinic. The studio is called Souls in Motion , and she and her co-worker, a woman named Louise, encourage clients who are willing to express themselves artistically either in painting or in sewing.