
Contents
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Saintly Correspondence—Martín de Porres Saintly Correspondence—Martín de Porres
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Seeking Correspondences—Letters from Hazel Scott Seeking Correspondences—Letters from Hazel Scott
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Comedic Catholic Correspondence—Letters to Brother Mario Hancock Comedic Catholic Correspondence—Letters to Brother Mario Hancock
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Conclusion: Intimate Friendships, Irreverent Spirituality, and Religious Authority Conclusion: Intimate Friendships, Irreverent Spirituality, and Religious Authority
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Notes Notes
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“Pray for good sounds”: Black Catholic Practice, Friendship, and Irreverence in the Intimate Correspondence of Mary Lou Williams
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Published:June 2024
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Abstract
This chapter highlights Mary Lou Williams’s written correspondences with two Black spiritual companions, Hazel Scott and Mario Hancock, while she stayed in Copenhagen, in Pittsburgh, and in her Hamilton Terrace apartment home in New York City between 1963 and 1970. Williams’s letters demonstrate her work to construct and maintain intimate and confessional conversations with other Black women, and with Black men religious, as they navigated spiritual life in a white religious hierarchy. As this set of Black folks collaboratively developed their relationships with God, saints, departed priests, and each other, their letters also reveal that irreverent humor, amid religious and spiritual cultivation, was important to their friendships. This chapter focuses on the religious content of Williams’s correspondences with Scott and Hancock to highlight one internationally prominent Black Catholic woman’s navigation of spiritual and material battles, along with her deployment of spiritual resources and regular communication with Black friends allied in (or adjacent to) the faith, within a global Christian church with a clear gender hierarchy and an implicit racial hierarchy that faced the prospect of desegregation in the US context.
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