Black History Month Reading
Some Suggested Titles from AAR's Reading Religion
Reading Religion is an openly accessible book review website published by the American Academy of Religion. The site provides up-to-date coverage of scholarly publishing in religious studies, reviewed by scholars with special interest and/or expertise in the relevant subfields. Reviews aim to be concise, comprehensive, and timely.
Below, the editors of Reading Religion have selected some books and reviews from the site and have shared some titles available to review. If you’re interested in reviewing books for Reading Religion, take a look at the guidelines. If there are any books missing from the Reading Religion site that you think should be there, email readingreligion@aarweb.org.
Reviews to Read
Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together
By Anthony B. Pinn
From the review:
“[Pinn’s] latest book is deeply ambitious and creative . . . It is an innovative volume that makes significant contributions to aesthetics, social theory, Black studies, and religious studies.” - Jason C. Bivins
The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice
By Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein
From the review:
“This book is highly recommended for everyone who is interested in the rich and diverse theological constructions coming out of the African continent and will serve as an excellent resource. The book is even more significant because it focuses on one of the key contributors to the emergence and blossoming of a distinctly African Christian theology, and one who has not gotten the kind of attention in the literature that her work deserves. Oredein writes in a style that is clear and analytically rigorous but still accessible to a wider readership. However, future work on Oduyoye could provide a more robust critique of her theological ideas, which (understandably) was not part of the author’s primary goals in this book.” – Isuwa Atsen
The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity
By Greg Garrett
From the review:
“This slim but powerfully written hagiography comes out of Garrett’s experience teaching Baldwin, as well as his own extensive reading of Baldwin’s oeuvre, including unpublished manuscripts. He draws widely from Baldwin’s fiction and non-fiction including Raoul Peck’s 2017 film “I Am Not Your Negro.” While the book isn’t solely aimed at Christians, Garrett clearly thinks that Christianity needs Baldwin now more than ever in a period when Christian nationalism is on the rise.” – Lynn Orilla Scott
In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II
By Leah Mickens
From the review:
“[This] is an important and elegant book. It adds much to an understudied field, and Mickens’ discussion of Our Lady of Lourdes and the overarching historical movements affecting it are ingeniously woven, concretely illustrating the church’s history and development. . . . A timely and outstanding addition to Black Catholic studies, I recommend this book to any historian interested in Black Catholicism, the 20th-century American South, and the ways in which events such as the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council impacted American Catholicism.” – Philip Chivily
The Black Coptic Church: Race and Imagination in a New Religion
By Leonard Cornell McKinnis
From the review:
“The Black Coptic Church is a theoretically and methodologically rich text that portrays the Black Coptic Church as a site for the enactment of Black freedom. Such enactment of freedom speaks, first, against an American plantocracy that diminishes Black lives, and, second, against a fatalistic Afropessimist view that sees no hope of redemption from the predicament into which Black lives have been plunged in the wake of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. The Black Coptic Church provides theology and rituals of redemption that rename, remake, and revive Black identity, and it also provides an ontology that roots their identity beyond the moments of slavery and racism." – David T. Ngong
Available for Review
Up Against a Crooked Gospel: Black Women's Bodies and the Politics of Redemption
By Melanie Jones Quarles
From the publisher:
“Drawing upon her grandmother's personal struggles with physical "bendedness" and the narrative of the bent woman in Luke 13:10-17, Melanie Jones Quarles engages Black religious thought and cultural criticism to expose how the Black Church paradoxically nurtures Black women while also sustaining their oppression. Quarles mines the prophetic imaginations of influential womanist thinkers, crafting a liberating vision that resists serving as surrogate "saviors" in society and religion.
With insights into politics, Christology, and biblical interpretation, this book boldly calls Black women to unbend their bodies and reclaim their moral agency in the face of crooked systems that attempt to constrain their freedom."
Critical Race Theology: White Supremacy, American Christianity, and the Ongoing Culture Wars
By Juan M. Floyd-Thomas
From the publisher:
"In Critical Race Theology Juan Floyd-Thomas examines the entangled roots of white supremacy, white Christian nationalism, and the raging culture wars in America. In this provocative and courageous work Floyd-Thomas charts a path for a revitalized social gospel for the 21st century.
Drawing insights from critical race theory, Black liberation theology, and prophetic Christianity, Floyd-Thomas proposes “critical race theology” as a framework to confront racism, exclusion, and oppression within American Christianity and society. Challenging the self-righteous distortions of conservatives, he calls on clergy and believers to truly embody the liberating spirit of Jesus's radical ethic of love."
The Gospel of Freedom: Black Evangelicals and the Underground Railroad
By Alicestyne Turley
From the publisher:
“Wilbur H. Siebert published his landmark study of the Underground Railroad in 1898, revealing a secret system of assisted slave escapes. Siebert's research relied on the accounts of northern white male abolitionists, and while useful in understanding the northern boundaries of the journey, his work omits the complicated narrative of assistance below the Mason-Dixon Line. In The Gospel of Freedom: Black Evangelicals and the Underground Railroad, author Alicestyne Turley positions Kentucky as a crucial "pass through" territory and addresses the important contributions of antislavery southerners who formed organized networks to assist those who were enslaved in the Deep South. Drawing on family history and lore as well as a large range of primary sources, Turley shows how free and enslaved African Americans developed successful systems to help those enslaved below the Mason-Dixon Line. Illuminating the roles of these Black freedom fighters, Turley questions the validity of long-held conclusions based on Siebert's original work and suggests new areas of inquiry for further exploration. The Gospel of Freedom seeks to fill in the historical gaps and promote the lost voices of the Underground Railroad.”
Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement
By AnneMarie Mingo
From the publisher:
“What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created. These women acted out of belief that what they did was bigger than themselves. Taking as their goal nothing less than the moral transformation of American society, they joined the movement because it was something they had to do. Their personal accounts of a lived religion enacted in the world provide powerful insights into how faith steels human beings to face threats, jail, violence, and seemingly implacable hatred. Throughout, Mingo draws on their experiences to construct an ethical model meant to guide contemporary activists in the ongoing pursuit of justice.
A depiction of moral imagination that resonates today, Have You Got Good Religion? reveals how Black Churchwomen’s understanding of God became action and transformed a nation."
Black Contemplative Preaching: A Hidden History of Prayer, Proclamation, and Prophetic Witness
By E. Trey Clark
From the publisher:
“Stereotypical images of African American Christian spirituality eclipse the profound diversity of Black preaching. As a result, contemplative preaching has become one of the most overlooked streams of gospel proclamation in Black Protestant contexts. Far from a new phenomenon, contemplative preaching consists of a robust tradition of orators, theologians, prophets, mystics, and pastors. In different ways, these proclaimers embody a life-giving, boundary-crossing, contemplative vision that fosters spiritual and social transformation.
In Black Contemplative Preaching, E. Trey Clark expands our understanding of Black religiosity by drawing attention to the rich history of contemplative preaching in the Black church. Clark brings this hidden history to light by examining the life and preaching ministry of three twentieth-century African American religious leaders: Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King Jr., and the late Bishop Barbara Harris. In addition, the book discusses the contemplative proclamation of contemporary spiritual leaders such as Ineda Pearl Adesanya, Veronica R. Goines, Luke A. Powery, and Frank A. Thomas, as well as poet and activist Amanda Gorman.
Black Contemplative Preaching challenges monolithic portraits of Black spirituality and ministry through an evaluation of these influential figures. The uncovering of this rich, yet neglected, history of mystical activism among Christian preachers sheds light on the creative synthesis of spirituality, social justice, and proclamation in the Black church. Ultimately, the book presents Black contemplative preaching as a historic and enduring source of theological wisdom that speaks to the political, ecological, and spiritual challenges of our times."
