In New World A-Coming (New York University Press), Judith Weisenfeld, professor of religion at Princeton, explores the way many Southern black migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean rejected conventional American racial classifications, instead embracing alternative visions of identity provided by their religious communities. Weisenfeld shows how members of the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, and congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews believed their religious and racial identities to be inseparable and divinely ordained, which shaped their conceptions of their bodies, families, communities, spaces, and politics.
