Why am I Here? A Personal Religious Journey

Albert J. Raboteau, Ph.D., is the Henry Putnam Professor Emeritus of Religion at Princeton University and a leading expert on African American religious history. Before Raboteau was born, his father, Albert Jordy Raboteau (1899–1943), was killed in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, by a white man who was never convicted of the crime. His mother moved from the South, where she was a teacher, to find a better place for her children. She remarried an African-American priest, who taught Raboteau Latin and Greek and helped him to focus on church and education. Accepted into college at the age of sixteen, Raboteau was awarded a BA by Loyola University in 1964 and an MA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He then studied at the Yale Graduate Program in Religious Studies, receiving his PhD in 1974. Raboteau's dissertation, later revised and published as the book Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South, was published just as the black studies movement was gaining steam in the 1970s. In 1982 Princeton University hired Raboteau, first as a visiting professor and then as full-time faculty. He is currently (2009) Henry W. Putnam Professor Emeritus of Religion.