Biography

Karen McCarthy Brown is a leading expert on religious practices carried on outside of religious institutions, a major component of contemporary urban religious life. Brown contends that, as a result of recent immigration patterns, American religious pluralism is not likely to articulate itself in familiar congregational models. Since 1993, she has led Drew University’s Newark Project, a field-based education program linking ethnographic research, curriculum development, advocacy, and community organizing. The Newark Project seeks to understand and document how “living religions” are adopted—and adapted—by individuals and communities trying to practice their religious traditions and affirm their identities, especially when these same people are ignored or condemned by traditional church, synagogue or temple teachings. Brown is on the editorial boards of The North Star, an Online Journal of African-American Religious History, The Boston Healing Landscape, a Ford project, and Meridians, an interdisciplinary journal focused on feminism, race and transnationalism.

Resources by this expert

• Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn
  (Univ. of California Press, 2001, 2nd ed.)
• Tracing the Spirit: Ethnographic Essays on Haitian Art
  (University of Washington Press, 1995)

• Los Angeles Times, December 28, 2002, “You Better Believe Federal Faith-Based Funding Is a Bad Idea”
• Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA.), December 8, 2001, “Voodoo priestess or nun?”
• Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2000, “A Return to Roots”
• The New York Times, December 31, 1998, “Where the Spirits Feel at Home”