Archives & Exhibits

With the participation of First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME), the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture has created a digital archive of the Rev. Dr. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray’s sermons and interviews in order to capture how Rev. Murray has been a force for positive social change in Los Angeles for more than four decades. Select videos are available below, and more than 450 pieces available through the USC Digital Library.

Click here to view the Collection on the USC Digital Library

Rev. Murray served as pastor of FAME for 27 years, transforming a small congregation into a megachurch that brought jobs, housing and corporate investment into South Los Angeles neighborhoods. The Murray Archive project makes Pastor Murray’s prophetic social witness available to a new generation of activists, pastors and scholars.

Please donate to Rev. Cecil Murray’s Circle of Support to preserve Rev. Murray’s legacy of socially engaged African-American Christianity. Your donation will support a book project with sermons and commentary, as well as the Rev. Dr. Cecil L. Murray Lecture Series.

The International Mission Photography Archive offers historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway, Germany and the United States. The photographs, which range in time from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, offer a visual record of missionary activities and experiences in Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea and the Caribbean. The photographs reveal the physical influence of missions, visible in mission compounds, churches and school buildings, as well as the cultural impact of mission teaching, religious practices and Western technology and fashions. Indigenous peoples’ responses to missions and the emergence of indigenous churches are represented, as are views of landscapes, cities and towns before and in the early stages of modern development.

The archive is hosted on the USC Digital Library website.

Click here to explore the International Mission Photography Archive

To find out more, please contact Prof. Jon Miller, senior research associate and director of IMPA.

Click here to download a PDF report about IMPA

At different times and in different parts of the world, Pentecostal and charismatic expressions of Christianity have followed very different trajectories. In Soviet-era Romania, for example, some Pentecostal groups were favored by the Ceausescu regime. But in Ukraine during the same period, Christian renewal movements were subject to harsh repression.

A full contemporary account of Pentecostalism and charismatic movements must be grounded in a better historical understanding of the variations in renewalist religion from one time and place to another.

To address this challenge, the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative (PCRI) collaborated with the USC Digital Library to build an online digital archive of primary historical materials—correspondence, organizational records, tracts, sermons, diaries, photographs, oral histories—from different regions of the world. In order to build this resource, PCRI provided funding to selected seminary and university libraries so that they could digitize and catalog the most important materials from their collections.

The wide range of cultural artifacts in the collection—including Stalinist propaganda posters as well as invaluable documents related to the lives of American Pentecostal women—makes the Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Archive (PCRA) a useful resource for cultural historians, religion scholars and anyone interested in the material history of 20th-century Christianity.

Click here to explore PCRA on the USC Digital Library website.

Coordinators for this project include Jon Miller of CRCC and Deborah Holmes-Wong and Matt Gainer of the USC Digital Library.

Participating libraries include:

• The Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary in Kiev, which has amassed material on Soviet history as well as Russian and Ukrainian Pentecostalism from the revolution until the 1960s.
• The Donald Gee Centre at Mattersey Hall in England, repository for rich materials concerning religious developments in the UK.
• The Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia, whose historical collections cover much of the region defined by the former Yugoslavia.
• The Hollenweger Center at the Free University in Amsterdam, which houses the very extensive collection of materials assembled by Pentecostal historian Walter Hollenweger.
• The D.J. Young Heritage Foundation in Kansas City, Kansas. Established in 2008, the collection aims to advance the Holiness-Pentecostal tradition through preservation of heritage documents and other artifacts of the Church of God in Christ.
• The Dr. Mattie McGlothen Library and Museum. Located in the McGlothen Temple Church of God in Christ complex in Richmond, California, the major focus of the collection is women’s work in the Church of God in Christ.
• The DuPree Holiness and Pentecostal Center in Gainesville, Florida, a collection that contains scholarly works as well as primary and secondary source materials that include articles, journalistic accounts, tracts, photographs, church literatures, church periodicals, academic theses and more from 1906 to the present.

In 2006, one fire gutted Chicago’s historic Pilgrim Baptist Church, destroying irreplaceable documents, including the original sheet music and letters of Thomas A. Dorsey, the “Father of Gospel Music.” While the tragedy deprived the world a significant part of the historic legacy of of America’s great composers and arrangers, the event also underscored the need for the systematic collection and preservation of the history of gospel music.

The Gospel Music History Archive is an effort to preserve the legacy of gospel music in a state-of-the-art digital archive. The GMHA digitizes and catalogues important documents and makes them available in a searchable database to scholars, gospel artists, librarians, church historians, teachers, and anyone with Internet access. The archive contains original audio and visual video interviews, music files, publicity materials, photographs, film, scholarly articles, and analysis from academic and gospel-community-based experts.

Partners: Center for Religion and Civic Culture, The Gospel Music History Project (The Black Voice Foundation), The Archives of African American Music and Culture (Indiana University), and the USC Digital Library.

View the collection at the USC Digital Library site

The Rwanda Library is a collection of 100 videotaped interviews with orphans and widows who survived the Rwandan Genocide. CRCC’s co-founder Donald E. Miller and his wife, Lorna, conducted these interviews over several years in partnership with Solace Ministries.

In 2001, the Millers went to Rwanda for the first time to present their research findings on the Armenian Genocide. During the conference, they meet a group of survivors who were raising their surviving siblings and sometimes neighbor children who had no one to care for them. The Millers offered to do oral history interviews with their members, and they seized on the idea. Within 9 months, they had 100 transcribed and translated interviews. A year later, an association of widows wanted to do the same thing. They produced 60 detailed and richly textured interviews, filed with terrifying stories of rape and slaughter. At that point, the Millers embarked on their own interview project, engaging with Jean Gakwandi, the director of Solace Ministries.

Gakwandi, a survivor who created Solace Ministries in 1995, believes that listening to survivors is the first step in the healing process. Solace has 60 communities throughout Rwanda where survivors find an alternative family, trauma counseling, education, mentoring, advocacy and health care.

The collection of videos is held by the Pomegranate Foundation, which has made excerpts of the interview available at rwandalibrary.com.

Click her to explore the videos

Renowned photographer Jerry Berndt collaborated with CRCC co-founder Donald Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller on several projects, including photographing religion in Los Angeles, a photo essay and exhibition called “Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide” (in partnership with the California African American Museum) and a book, Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope, (University of California Press 2003). Some of his photographs are archived by the USC Digital Library.

Click here to view the collection on the USC Digital Library

See exhibits below for more information on his work with CRCC.

Jerry Berndt grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His photographs appeared in major magazines in Europe and the United States. A 2009 book, Insight (Steidl & Partners, 2009), contains photographs from his work from the 1960s to the 1980s. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for his book, Missing Persons. He taught photography at the Art Institute of Boston and the University of Massachusetts. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; the International Center of Photography, New York City; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France. Berndt died in Paris in July of 2013.

“Stories of Social Change: Spirituality in Action” is a multimedia exhibit based on the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s Spiritual Exemplars Project. Through the project, CRCC’s team of journalists and researchers profiled 104 spiritually engaged humanitarians from 2018 to 2023.

The exhibit was originally presented at the USC Annenberg for Communication and Journalism, educating and inspiring 2,500 people in Fall 2023.

View the multimedia components of the exhibit

An Invitation to Host “Stories of Social Change: Spirituality in Action”

The physical exhibition is available for presentation in educational, civic, religious and communal spaces. The content can be adapted to different audiences.

To see a complete list of assets available as part of the exhibit, please download the exhibit catalogue.

Email crcc@usc.edu for information about this exhibit.

Portraits of Faith, Hope and Social Transformation

Photographs by Jerry Berndt

Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities in the world and is a microcosm of our global community. One window into this complex metropolis is the institution of religion as portrayed by Jerry Berndt. Through his lens we see people raising their hands in praise, kneeling in submission to a higher power, and working together to bring about a more just social order.

Click here to view select photos from the exhibit

Email crcc@usc.edu for information about this exhibit.

Photographs:
100 black and white photographs
18″ X 22″, black metal frames

Previous Venues:
Berkeley Public Library
Biola University
California State Capitol Building
Cal State Fullerton (North American Interfaith Network)
Directors Guild of America (City of Angels Film Festival)
First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Fuller Theological Seminary
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley
La Sierra University
Loma Linda University
Los Angeles Public Library, Central Branch
Los Angeles Convention Center (Encuentro 2000)
Masjid Umar Ibn Al-Khattab
New Horizon School (Cornerstone Theater Festival of Faith)
Pasadena Public Library
Polytechnic School, Pasadena
San Diego Public Library, Mission Valley Branch
San Francisco Public Library
Southern California Library for Social Research
University of Dayton
University of Southern California Festival 125
University of Southern California, Helen Lindhurst Gallery
University of Southern California, Doheny Library
University of California Los Angeles, Research Library

Portraits of Survival and Hope

Photographs by Jerry Berndt

In a period of 100 days in 1994, at least 800,000 people were killed in the small country of Rwanda, located in the Great Lakes region of central Africa. The devastation caused by the genocide is evident in images from genocide memorials: weapons, lye-covered human remains, and rows of skulls. The exhibit “The Rwanda Genocide: Portraits of Survival and Hope” illustrates the past, but focuses on two populations of survivors: orphans who are heading households of their surviving siblings and widows who are struggling to care for their children—as they grieve their loss. The photographs by Jerry Berndt explore both the pain of the genocide and the current attempts at reconciliation and healing.

Click here to view select photos from the exhibit

USC professor Donald E. Miller and his wife Lorna Touryan Miller began a partnership with an association of orphans (AOCM) after attending an international conference on genocide in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Drawing on their expertise in oral history, they worked with the leadership of this organization to document the members’ experiences of the genocide and their current struggle for survival. One hundred interviews were tape recorded, transcribed, and translated into English. Subsequently, another project was launched with an association of widows (AVEGA) who survived the genocide, and sixty interviews were done. On two different occasions, photojournalist Jerry Berndt joined the Millers to photograph the orphans, genocide memorial sites, and various non-governmental organizations that are working with survivors in Rwanda. In partnership with the California African American Museum, the Center for Religion and Civic Culture created a traveling photo exhibition with selections from Berndt’s photographs.

Email crcc@usc.edu for information about this exhibit.

Photographs:
43 black and white photographs
16″ X 20″ images framed to 20″ X 24″

Photographs and selections from interviews with orphans appear in a publication, “Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide,” a photo essay produced by the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC. Contact CRCC to obtain physical copies of the “Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide” book (April 2004), or download a PDF here.

For additional information about the orphan association, visit www.rwanda-survivors.com.