About

Omar M. McRoberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and The College at the University of Chicago. He holds a B.A. from the University of Chicago (1994), an M.A. from Harvard University (1997), and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (2000). His scholarly and teaching interests include the sociology of religion, urban sociology, urban poverty, race, and collective action. His first book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood, is based on an ethnographic study of religious life in Four Corners, a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Boston containing twenty-nine congregations. The book explains the high concentration, wide variety, and ambiguous social impact of religious activity in the neighborhood, and it received the 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Currently, McRoberts is conducting a study of black religious responses to, and influences on, social welfare policy since the New Deal, culminating with George W. Bush's Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. He is also initiating an ethnographic project on cultures of death and dying among black congregations in low-income urban contexts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Ethnology
• Religious studies
• Criminology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Of Movements and Markets: Religious Competition and the Problem of Black Church Relevance

  Midwest Social Sciences Journal · 2022-12-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Why do cross-denominational public religious movements such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference appear, despite the market-like competitive behavior of churches? Religious economy theory offers one set of explanations, based on a supply-side approach to the dynamics of numeric religious growth and decline. Namely, ecumenical movements are engaged by denominations, or religious firms, in membership decline. The history of national Black ecumenical movements, however, points to ways that religious economic theorizing fails to account for the multiple modes of social consciousness regarding church survival that motivate institutional religious activity. Black churches have existed not merely as a market but as a field where market consciousness transforms into movement consciousness at historic moments of perceived political opportunity. At such moments, unified public religious action on behalf of “the people” is understood as more important than the competitive dominance of individual firms in a private religious market.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Religion and the Boston Miracle: The Effect of Black Ministry on Youth Violence

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 32 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  In Boston, the key community group working with the police has been a set of black churches known as the Ten Point Coalition. Rival gangs turned to firearms to protect and defend their turf and gang identity. Boston's faith-based organizations did not begin working together as a group until 1992. The ministers' message to the youths, nevertheless, is quite different. Public awareness of such "moral realities" translates into a special variety of political capital that allows clergy to transcend stale partisan political debates, even while injecting their political views into those debates. In traditional political discourse, emphases on structural determinacy and individual responsibility are at odds. The New Testament demands action on behalf of others. Hundreds of organizations around the country, including the Ten Point Coalition, have taken this mandate seriously, developing a plethora of "faith-based" responses to human suffering in urban cores. Ministers may possibly be ideal partners.

  PublisherDOI

• Front Matter

  American Journal of Sociology · 2020-07-01

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 2. Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• 2 Civil Religion and Black Church Political Mobilization

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

• 5 Beyond Savior, Victim, and Sinner: Neighborhood Civic Life and "Absent Presence" in the Religious District

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2008-10-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2005 SSSR Presidential Address: On Being a Community of Scholars—Practicing the Study of Religion

  Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion · 2006-05-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• H. Richard Niebuhr Meets “The Street”

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2005-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Salvaging Souls, Saving Money: <i>Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era.</i> by John P. Bartkowski and Helen A. Regis. New York: New York University Press, 2003, 216 Pages

  Contexts · 2004-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Mysterium Tremendum: Thoughts toward an Aesthetic Study of Religious Experience

  The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · 2004-08-25 · 55 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Much sociological ethnography of religion values an objective distance between observer and subject to the point of reducing religion to a catalogue of doctrines and rituals, failing all the while to take seriously the subjective experiences of believers and the experiences of ethnographers themselves. The association of religious experience with transcendent feelings of awe or ecstasy, coupled with the methodological impossibility of perfect empathy, further drives the ethnography of religion away from the consideration of religious experience. I offer thoughts toward an aesthetics-oriented method of studying lived religiosity, whereby the ethnographer becomes sensitive to aspects of religious experience that are precognitive but not necessarily spiritual.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rebecca Ewert

  Northwestern University

  1 shared

• Terry Clark

  Mount Royal University

  1 shared

• Pranathi Diwakar

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

• Sandra A. Allan

  1 shared

• Karin Knorr Cetina

  Bielefeld University

  1 shared

• Jenny Berrien

  1 shared

• Alessandra Lembo

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

• Dingxin Zhao

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2005 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scien…