Outlines the five phases of African American reading and shows how the Bible offered a language-world through which Africans Americans have negotiated the strange land into which they were thrust.
The Million Man March in Washington, D.C. remains a major landmark in the journey of the African-American community. Attended by controversy, it fired the imagination of African-American males throughout the country. Black Religion after the Million Man March brings together a range of Black theologians -- men and women -- to assess the spiritual and theological issues posed by this event and, of greater importance, its implications for the future.
Essays in the first part wrestle with conflicting reactions to the March itself -- including sharply critical perspectives. The second part addresses the theme of "manhood". The third part considers the themes of responsibility, atonement, restoration, reconciliation, and renewal. Together, these essays provide a challenging agenda for Christians committed to African-American liberation.
Since its first publication 25 years ago Black Religion and Black Radicalism has established itself as the classic treatment of African American religious history. Wilmore shows to what extent the history of African Americans can be told in terms of religion, and to what extent this religious history has been inseparably bound to the struggle for freedom and justice. From the story of the slave rebellions and emancipation, to the rise of Black nationalism and the freedom struggles of recent times, up through the development of Black, womanist, and Afrocentric theologies, Wilmore offers an essential interpretation of African American religious history.
This examination of modern black theology creates a new paradigm known as Integrasegreology, which offers a corrective theory to the polarization of the ideologies of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It also addresses the important social and theological deficiencies in Dr. James Cone's original introduction of black theology. Integrasegreology acknowledges the importance of integration and separation theories and espouses the creation of new values, individual and collective vocations, and the definition of Black Power-Black Consciousness and its seven critical aspects. It also argues that black theology should not be an end in itself, but serve the greater purpose of the liberation of oppressed blacks throughout the world.
Throughout African-American history, religion has been indelibly intertwined with the fight against intolerance and racial prejudice. Martin Luther King, Jr.-America's best-known champion of civil liberties-was a Baptist minister. Father Divine, a fiery preacher who established a large following in the 1920s and 1930s, convinced his disciples that he could cure not only disease and infirmity, but also poverty and racism. An in-depth examination of African-American history and religion, this comprehensive and lively book provides panoramic coverage of the black religious and social experience in America. Renowned historian Albert J. Raboteau traces the subtle blending of African tribal customs with the powerful Christian establishment, the migration to cities, the growth of Islam, and the 200-year fight for freedom and identity which was so often centered around African-American churches. From the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the Nation of Islam and from the first African slaves to Louis Farrakhan, this far-reaching book chronicles the evolution of an important and influential component of our religious and historical heritage. African American Religion combines meticulously researched historical facts with a fast-paced, engaging narrative that will appeal to readers of any age.
By examining the spiritual history and God-ordained destiny of African American women, Rebecca Florence Osaigbovo helps us turn the tide of evil in our own lives and the lives of our families, cities and nations.
Daughters of Anowa provides an analysis of the lives of African women today from an African woman's own perspective. It is a study of the influence of culture and religion - particularly of traditional African cultures and Christianity - on African women's lives. Mercy Amba Oduyoye illustrates how myths, proverbs, and folk tales (called "folktalk") operate in the socialization of young women, working to preserve the norms of the community. Daughters of Anowa reveals how global patriarchy manifests itself in these social structures, in both patrilineal and matrilineal communities. Organized as a narrative in three cycles, Daughters of Anowa demonstrates how folktalk alienates women from power, discourages individuality and encourages conformity. It also considers the possibilities for the future. Oduyoye posits that change will come about only when the daughters of Anowa (the mythic representative of Africa itself) confront the realities of culture and religion in perpetuating patriarchal oppression and work to realize the goal of a new woman in a new Africa.
Donald Matthews affirms once and for all the African foundation of African-American religious practice. His analysis of the methods employed by historians, social scientists, and literary critics in the study of African-American religion and the Negro spiritual leads him to develop a methodology that encompasses contemporary scholarship without compromising the integrity of African-American religion and culture. Because the Negro spiritual is the earliest extant body of African-American folk religious narration, Matthews believes that it holds the key to understanding African-American religion. He explores the works of such seminal black scholars as W. E. B. DuBois, Melville Herskovits, and Zora Neale Hurston, tracing the early development of the African-centered approach to the interpretation of African-American religion. This approach involves "cultural/structuralism," the author's term for the method used by DuBois, Herskovits, and Hurston that emphasizes the thick reading of narrative expressions. Such a reading allows the scholar to identify the cultural significance of particular oral and written texts and serves as a point of identification and a cultural link between African and African-American religion. Matthews' close analysis of the spiritual employs a dialectical and postmodernist reading and reveals a religious philosophy that addresses the deepest concerns and desires of Africans in America. These concerns are cultural, political, and psychological, but are ultimately related to African religious structures of meaning. This book poses a challenge to end the battle between Afrocentrists and multiculturalists by acknowledging their common intellectualheritage in the works of DuBois, Herskovits, and Hurston. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of African-American religion and culture and those interested in Afrocentric literature.
Essays and interviews from one of the most insightful and thought-provoking black intellectuals to emerge since the heyday of the civil rights movement. Here, collected for the first time, are interviews and essays representing Michael Eric Dyson's most important thinking on race and identity. Exploring such topics as "whiteness" as seen through a black man's eye, modernism and postmodernism in black culture, and the emancipating role of black music from the plantation to the ghetto, Open Mike is a perfect introduction to Dyson's work and a must-have for students and scholars in African American Studies and Cultural Studies.
With colonization come the dismantling of traditional African belief systems. Influenced by the Eurpopean propaganda mills, some Africans began to believe that they had produced nothing of worth. This is the origin of Black seminarians who could not find a Black Theology. In Black Seminarians, ben-Jochannan outlines sources of Black theology before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It's important for us to know that the ideas, practices, and concepts that went into the making of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were already old in Africa before Europe was born. Black Seminarians marks an important first step in our journey to reclaim our spiritual heritage. -- From the introduction.
"This collection of writings, drawn from a wide variety of sources, reveals the intellectual depth and breadth of the author. The articles include political commentary, cultural critique, literary analysis, extended book reviews, and even a short story by West. All of these are held together by a prophetic Afro-American Christian perspective. The value of this book is that it provides easy access to a significant selection of the author's corpus." --Religious Studies Review (October 1989) "This volume collects over 50 articles, book reviews, and addresses by a Union Seminary theologian . . . . The most eloquent pieces are those in which West explains and interprets his more personally felt tradition of Afro-American Protestantism."
Anne Streaty Wimberly proposes a method for educating Christians-the story-linking process. In Soul Stories: African American Christian Education she applies it specifically to the life experiences, history, and evolving liberation of African American Christians who are encouraged to see the connection between biblical stories, their own personal stories, and the stories of important African Americans in history. Christian education in African American contexts is strengthened by reclaiming the story-linking method that emerged naturally in the African American heritage.
The contemporary African American situation, argues Carlyle Fielding Stewart, is not merely an experience of racial oppression and devastating discrimination. At the roots of African American Christian life is a powerful force of soul, a dynamic spirituality that provides joy and hope. This has allowed the survival of African Americans in the midst of a hostile and sometimes brutal culture; even more, this spirituality has empowered African Americans in a celebration of life that can transform culture and establish a new kind of freedom.
Highly accessible and enormously practical, Soul Survivors offers a paradigm of spiritual freedom for all peoples in their struggle for liberation from the world's shackles.
Given the unique history of African Americans and their diverse religious traditions -- seen in black Christianity, the Nation of Islam, Voodoo, and others -- is there one fundamental meaning to black religion in America? What is the heart and soul of African American religious life?
As a leader in both black religious studies and theology, Anthony Pinn has probed the dynamism and variety of African American religious expressions. In this work, which he also delivered as the Edward Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, England, he searches out the basic structure of black religion, tracing the black religious spirit in its many historical manifestations. Pinn finds in the terrors of enslavement of black bodies and subsequent oppressions the primal experience to which the black religious impulse provides a perennial and cumulative response. Oppressions entailed the denial of personhood and creation of an object: the Negro. Slave auctions, punishments, and later, lynchings created an existential dread but also evoked a quest, a search, for complex subjectivity or authentic personhood that still fuels black religion today. Pinn's promising work offers a major new understanding of what it means to be black and religious in the United States.
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