THE COLLECTIVE CHARACTERS OF RELIGIOUS CONGREGATIONS

Our primary aim in this article is to advocate for the interdisciplinary study of the collective character traits of local religious congregations, taking as our focal example local Christian congregations. It should be clear that such study presently lies on the frontier of interdisciplinary religious studies. Yet, as we will attempt to show in the first section, the way has been paved for the study of such collective character traits through salient developments within several academic disciplines in recent decades. This frontier, in other words, is open for exploration, and there are available tools that can help us explore it. We will illustrate how such exploration may be undertaken fruitfully in the second section by focusing on two distinct kinds of virtuous collective character traits of Christian congregations: traits that enable a congregation to fulfill its distinctive role in the missio Dei, and traits that enable a congregation's members to flourish in their interpersonal relationships. In each case, we will identify a candidate collective virtue of the relevant type, discuss its nature from philosophical and theological perspectives, and, drawing on relevant empirical research, provide reason for thinking that applying empirical methods to it can yield additional insights about its value.     

Inez Beverly Prosser and the education of African Americans

Inez Beverly Prosser (ca. 1895-1934) was arguably the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in psychology. Her dissertation, completed in 1933, examined personality differences in black children attending either voluntarily segregated or integrated schools and concluded that black children were better served in segregated schools. This research was one of several studies in the 1920s and 1930s that was part of the debate on segregated schools as maintained in the United States under the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). This article examines the life and career of Prosser in the context of educational barriers and opportunities for African Americans in the early part of the twentieth century and explores the arguments that pitted African Americans against one another in determining how best to educate black children, arguments that eventually led to the desegregation decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).