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Podcast: New Books in American Politics
Episode: Robin L. Owens, "'My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole': Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scriptures" (Georgetown UP, 2022)
Description: US Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is well-known as an interpreter and defender of the Constitution, particularly through her landmark speech during Richard Nixon's 1974 impeachment hearings. However, before she developed faith in the Constitution, Jordan had faith in Christianity. In "My Faith in the Constitution is Whole" Barbara Jordan and the Politics of Scripture (Georgetown UP, 2022), Robin L. Owens shows how Jordan turned her religious faith and her faith in the Constitution into a powerful civil religious expression of her social activism.Owens begins by examining the lives and work of the nineteenth-century Black female orator-activists Maria W. Stewart an...