Celebrating Black History Month / Black Theology & Ethics

In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Bonhoeffer absorbed the Christianity of the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed rather than joins the oppressors and a theology that challenges the way God can be used to underwrite a union of race and religion.

This volume discusses normative theological categories from a black perspective and argues that there is no major Christian doctrine on which black theology has not commented. Part One explores introductory questions such as: what have been the historical and social factors fostering a black theology, and what are some of the internal factors key to its growth? Part Two examines major doctrines which have been important for black theology in terms of clarifying key intellectual foci common to the study of religion. The final part discusses black theology as a world-wide development constituted by interdisciplinary approaches. The volume has an important role in bringing Christian thought into confrontation with one of the central challenges of modernity, namely the problem of race and racism. This Companion puts theological themes in conversation with issues of ethnicity, gender, social analysis, politics and class and is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students.

An African-American theologian presents this timely critique of the "victimology" theme within black liberation theology and its long-standing spiritual and social implications.

Black Practical Theology brings together the hermeneutical conversation between scholars working within the traditional disciplines of theological education and those scholars working within practical theology. To this ongoing conversation, Andrews and Smith add the voices of pastors of black congregations and para-church leaders who serve the communities of faith who daily confront the challenges this work addresses.

This volume has an important role in bringing Christian thought into confrontation with one of the central challenges of modernity, namely the problem of race and racism. This Companion puts theological themes in conversation with issues of ethnicity, gender, social analysis, politics and class and is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students.

How Can an African-American consciousness and Reformed theology benefit each other? Where was God in the Atlantic Slave Trade? How does Christianity triumph among people historically oppressed in part by the church itself? Anthony Carter brings positive, informed responses to such questions, thereby enriching our understanding and furthering racial reconciliation.

In his reflections on God, Jesus, suffering, and liberation, James H. Cone relates the gospel message to the experience of the black community. But a wider theme of the book is the role that social and historical context plays in framing the questions we address to God as well as the mode of the answers provided.

Fields challenges the church to allow its theology to be formed by black theology's confrontational ministry, believing this will lead to forgiveness and reconciliation for both the oppressed and the oppressor. This short, accessible introduction to black theology draws upon history, hermeneutics, culture, and Scripture to create a dialogue of respect and reconciliation between blacks and whites within the evangelical church.

Hobson offers the first in-depth study of prophetic traditions in African American religion. Drawing on contemporary speeches, essays, sermons, reminiscences, and works of theological speculation from 1800 to 1950, he shows how African American prophets shared a belief in a ''God of the oppressed." It also examines the conflict between the African American prophets who believed that the nation could one day be redeemed through struggle, and those who felt that its hypocrisy and malevolence lay too deep for redemption.

In this volume, sixteen theologians assess the impact and import of black theology and the new challenges presented by today's intellectual, social, religious, and geopolitical situation. Including two chapters by James H. Cone, the pioneer of black theology, the volume examines black theology and the black churches, black theology and the white churches, black theology in light of global religions, and the ongoing spiritual challenges to African Americans today. A major focus of the volume is the contribution of womanist thought.

Leading contemporary theologians and scholars present essays on the themes of liberation and reconciliation in tribute to J. Deotis Roberts. The essays are divided into the following sections: Theological Reflection, Faith in Dialogue, and Shaping the Practice of Ministry. The compilation presents an interesting array of perspectives on the ways in which Christian theology, ethics, and ministry are involved in the quests for liberation and reconciliation in North America and the rest of the world.

This rich and insightful new book on the African American religious experience gives both critique and appreciation to the Africentrism articulated by Molefi Asante. Both author and Asante beleive that "to embrace a religion is to anchor oneself into the culture out of which the original religion emerged." Roberts tries to connect Christian faith with African culture, without losing the essential integrity and uniqueness of either.

An expansion of the 1971 classic text, this second edition of Liberation and Reconciliation argues for a balance between the quest for liberation and the need for reconciliation in black-white relations. Written by one of the pioneers of Black Theology, it examines biblical and theological themes from the perspective of Black experience and concludes that nonviolent reconciliation is the best response to racial oppression.

Widely regarded as the "Father of Black Theology, this autobiographical work by James Cone is truly the capstone to his career.

Hill brings two of the most prominent theologians of our time, Martin Luther King Jr. and Desmond Tutu, into conversation to explore the meaning of the Christian ideas of reconciliation, multiculturalism, and social justice for today's world. It offers a comprehensive analysis of King and Tutu's theology with implications for contemporary issues.

Beginning with King's theology anchored in the black church tradition, Erskine places King in conversation with Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and James Cone. He skillfully explains how King was nourished by, and helped to nourish, these teeming theological crosscurrents. Erskine proposes that womanist theology provides an insightful critique of King's thought and helps supply a critical missing element in King's vision - the explicit acknowledgment of the rightful place of women in the Beloved Community.

In this book, Richard W. Wills Sr. offers a comprehensive analysis of King's appeal for civil rights by investigating his understanding of imago Dei. While King shared with many of his black church forebears the view that humanity's creation by God was a powerful argument for the equality of all people, he also took the concept much further. For King, being made in God's image meant that human beings have not only the right but also the power to reshape society and to build a "beloved community" on earth.

This compelling portrait of who Jesus is for the black community surveys the history of the Black Christ from the early slave testimonies to the writings of prominent religious and literary figures through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

In light of globalization, ongoing issues of race, gender, and class, and the rapidly changing roles of institutions, this volume asserts that Christian social ethics must be reframed completely. Three questions are at the heart of this vital inquiry: How can moral community flourish in a global context? What kinds of leadership do we need to nurture global moral community? How shall we construe social institutions and social movements for change in the twenty–first century?

This volume in the Library of Theological Ethics series draws on writings from the early nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries to explore the intersection of black experience and Christian faith throughout the history of the United States.

Black Church Studies seeks to give an account of the broad meaning of Christian faith in the African American experience. Drawing on the work of specialists in several fields, it introduces the core theological disciplines from an African American standpoint – from African American biblical interpretation to womanist theology and ethics to sociological understandings of the life of African American churches.

In The Burden of Black Religion, Curtis Evans traces ideas about African American religion from the antebellum period to the middle of the twentieth century. Central to the story, he argues, was the deep-rooted notion that blacks were somehow "naturally" religious. This important work reveals how interpretations of black religion played a crucial role in shaping broader views of African Americans and had real consequences in their lives.

This book narrates the transformation of Black faith and culture in the North American context from enslavement to emancipation, discusses Black people's confrontation with the crisis of segregation and how it led to the culmination of the civil rights struggle in the United States and beyond, and focuses on the contemporary developments in the religious experience of African Americans as they moved from the Black Power era to the Age of Obama.

This first-ever Black Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the theology and history of the Black Catholic experience from those who know it best: Black Catholic scholars, teachers, activists, and ministers. The reader offers a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary approach that illuminates what it means to be Black and Catholic in the United States. This collection of essays from prominent scholars, both past and present, brings together contributions from theologians M. Shawn Copeland, Kim Harris, Diana Hayes, Bryan Massingale, and C. Vanessa White, and historians Cecilia Moore, Diane Batts Morrow, and Ronald Sharps, and selections from an earlier generation of thinkers and activists, including Thea Bowman, Cyprian Davis, and Clarence Rivers. Contributions delve into the interlocking fields of history, spirituality, liturgy, and biography. Through their contributions, Black Catholic Studies scholars engage theologies of liberation and the reality of racism, the Black struggle for recognition within the Church, and the distinctiveness of African-inspired spirituality, prayer, and worship. By considering their racial and religious identities, these select Black Catholic theologians and historians add their voices to the contemporary conversation surrounding culture, race, and religion in America, inviting engagement from students and teachers of the American experience, social commentators and advocates, and theologians and persons of faith

Temperance and Cosmopolitanism explores the nature and meaning of cosmopolitan freedom in the nineteenth century through a study of selected African American authors and reformers: William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, George Moses Horton, Frances E. W. Harper, and Amanda Berry Smith. Their voluntary travels, a reversal of the involuntary movement of enslavement, form the basis for a critical mode of cosmopolitan freedom rooted in temperance. Both before and after the Civil War, white Americans often associated alcohol and drugs with blackness and enslavement. Carole Lynn Stewart traces how African American reformers mobilized the discourses of cosmopolitanism and restraint to expand the meaning of freedom--a freedom that draws on themes of abolitionism and temperance not only as principles and practices for the inner life but simultaneously as the ordering structures for forms of culture and society. While investigating traditional meanings of temperance consistent with the ethos of the Protestant work ethic, Enlightenment rationality, or asceticism, Stewart shows how temperance informed the founding of diasporic communities and civil societies to heal those who had been affected by the pursuit of excess in the transatlantic slave trade and the individualist pursuit of happiness. By elucidating the concept of the "black Atlantic" through the lenses of literary reformers, Temperance and Cosmopolitanism challenges the narrative of Atlantic history, empire, and European elite cosmopolitanism. Its interdisciplinary approach will be of particular value to scholars of African American literature and history as well as scholars of nineteenth-century cultural, political, and religious studies.

The third and final volume in the first comprehensive history of Black social Christianity, by the "greatest theological ethicist of the twenty-first century" (Michael Eric Dyson) The Black social gospel is a tradition of unsurpassed and ongoing importance in American life, argues Gary Dorrien in his groundbreaking trilogy on the history of Black social Christianity. This concluding volume, an interpretation of the tradition since the early 1970s, follows Dorrien's award-winning The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel and Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. Beginning in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., Dorrien examines the past fifty years of this intellectual and activist tradition, interpreting its politics, theology, ethics, social criticism, and social justice organizing. He argues that Black social Christianity is today an intersectional tradition of discourse and activist religion that interrelates liberation theology, womanist theology, antiracist politics, LGBTQ+ theory, cultural criticism, progressive religion, broad-based interfaith organizing, and global solidarity politics. A Darkly Radiant Vision features in-depth discussions of Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, Gayraud Wilmore, James Cone, Cornel West, Katie Geneva Cannon, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Traci Blackmon, William J. Barber II, Raphael G. Warnock, and many others.