Theology and Race

In this classic theological treatise, the acclaimed theologian and religious leader Howard Thurman (1900-1981) demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised. Jesus is a partner in the pain of the oppressed and the example of His life offers a solution to ending the descent into moral nihilism. Hatred does not empower--it decays. Only through self-love and love of one another can God's justice prevail.

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 largefollowing 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 powerfulChristian 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 LouisFarrakhan, 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 anyage.

Holmes's research — through oral histories, church records, and written accounts — details not only ways in which contemplative experience is built into African American collective worship but also the legacy of African monasticism, a history of spiritual exemplars, and unique meditative worship practices.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions?  In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity’s highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.   A probing study of the cultural fragmentation—social, spatial, and racial—that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities.  Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

How do ethnic and cultural diversity affect spiritual formation? The authors of A Many Colored Kingdom explore Christian formation and teaching in the church, with a particular focus on intercultural and interethnic relationships. Well-qualified to speak on issues of diversity, the authors describe relevant aspects of their own personal journeys; key issues emerging from their studies and teaching germane to race, culture, and ethnicity; and teaching implications that bring right practice to bear on church ministry. A final chapter contains a conversation among the authors responding to one another's insights and concerns. This book will be required reading for those engaged in as well as those preparing for a life of teaching and ministry in our increasingly multicultural world.

Gray details his journey from racism to righteousness through the transforming power of the Holy Blood.

THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE IN AMERICA'S SEGREGATED SOUTH "One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question."--Atlanta Journal & Constitution   In the Deep South of the 1950's, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man.   What happened to John Howard Griffin--from the outside and within himself--as he made his way through the segregated Deep South is recorded in this searing work of nonfiction. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity every American must read.   With an Epilogue by the author and an Afterword by Robert Bonazzi

Why, despite continued efforts to increase understanding and expand opportunities, do black and white Americans still lead separate lives, continually marked by tension and hostility? In his much-lauded classic, newly updated to reflect the changing realities of race in our nation, Andrew Hacker explains the origins and meaning of racism and clarifies the conflicting theories of equality and inferiority. He paints a stark picture of racial inequality in America -- focusing on family life, education, income, and employment -- and explores the current controversies over politics, crime, and the causes of the gap between the races. Illuminating and oftentimes startling, Two Nations demonstrates how race has defined America's history and will continue to shape its future.

Examines the history of Afro-American philosophy, discusses the traditional responses of Blacks to racism, and argues for a fusion of Christianity and progressive Marxism.

Through a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 people and an additional 200 face-to-face interviews, Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith probed the grassroots of white evangelical America. They found that despite recent efforts by the movement's leaders to address the problem of racial discrimination, evangelicals themselves seem to be preserving America's racial chasm. In fact, most white evangelicals see no systematic discrimination against blacks. But the authors contend that it is not active racism that prevents evangelicals from recognizing ongoing problems in American society. Instead, it is the evangelical movement's emphasis on individualism, free will, and personal relationships that makes invisible the pervasive injustice that perpetuates racial inequality. Most racial problems, the subjects told the authors, can be solved by the repentance and conversion of the sinful individuals at fault. Combining a substantial body of evidence with sophisticated analysis and interpretation, the authors throw sharp light on the oldest American dilemma. In the end, they conclude that despite the best intentions of evangelical leaders and some positive trends, real racial reconciliation remains far over the horizon.

A landmark in the conversation about race and religion in America.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality. In this "vital, necessary, and beautiful book" (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and "allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people' (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, DiAngelo examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively. Download readers guides at www.beacon.org/whitefragility.

This collection contains the complete poetic works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was among the first African Americans to gain wide renown for literature in the United States. A poet of unquestionable skill and ability, Paul Laurence Dunbar was the son of two former slaves. His father, who managed to escape slavery, was an early enlistee who fight for the Union army in the American Civil War - a fact which profoundly influenced his son's outlook upon the U.S. military and life as a citizen of the USA. The poetry of Dunbar shows his flair for observation and superb knack for smooth-flowing yet profound words. Noticing immediately how he could swiftly create and sell poems to popular magazines, the young Dunbar turned down offers for educational support and instead devoted his time and effort to writing. Uniquely, Dunbar would write poets in regional dialects, incorporating slang of both white and black Americans.

An authoritative history by the preeminent scholar of the Civil War era, The Second Founding traces the arc of the three foundational Reconstruction amendments from their origins in antebellum activism and adoption amidst intense postwar politics to their virtual nullification by narrow Supreme Court decisions and Jim Crow state laws. Today these amendments remain strong tools for achieving the American ideal of equality, if only we will take them up.

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE WINNER HEARTLAND AWARD WINNER  DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST        NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times  * USA Today * O: The Oprah Magazine * Amazon * Publishers Weekly *  Salon * Newsday  * The Daily Beast   NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker *  The Washington Post * The Economist * Boston Globe * San Francisco Chronicle *  Chicago   Tribune * Entertainment Weekly * Philadelphia Inquirer * The Guardian * The Seattle Times * St. Louis Post-Dispatch  * The Christian Science Monitor  From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.   With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

"Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." --Rainer Maria Rilke Life is full of questions: questions about our identity, our relationships, our faith. Sometimes it seems like there are no easy answers. But our questioning can lead us on a journey into greater understanding and purpose. Jeffrey Keuss says that asking good questions helps us to lead good lives. He takes us on a tour of Scripture to find insights from people who asked questions of God and others. From God asking Adam and Eve, "Where are you?" to the Samaritan woman asking Jesus for water, Live the Questions explores critical questions in Scripture and what they can teach us about doubt, faith, and uncertainty in our everyday lives. Grappling with hard questions is necessary for us to form deeper faith commitments and discern who we are called to become. So don't be afraid of the questions--live them.

"Many white Christians across America are waking up to the fact that something is seriously wrong--but often this is where we get stuck." Confronted by the deep-rooted racial injustice in our society, many white Christians instinctively scramble to add diversity to their churches and ministries. But is diversity really the answer to the widespread racial dysfunction we see in the church? In this simple but powerful book, Pastor David Swanson contends that discipleship, not diversity, lies at the heart of our white churches' racial brokenness. Before white churches can pursue diversity, he argues, we must first take steps to address the faulty discipleship that has led to our segregation in the first place. Drawing on the work of philosopher James K. A. Smith and others, Swanson proposes that we rethink our churches' habits, or liturgies, and imagine together holistic, communal discipleship practices that can reform us as members of Christ's diverse body.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, the National Book Award-winning masterwork revealing how racist ideas were created, spread, and became deeply rooted in American society. Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America--it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. He uses the life stories of five major American intellectuals to drive this history: Puritan minister Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary activist Angela Davis. As Kendi shows, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. They were created to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation's racial inequities. In shedding light on this history, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose racist thinking. In the process, he gives us reason to hope. Praise for Stamped from the Beginning: "We often describe a wonderful book as 'mind-blowing' or 'life-changing' but I've found this rarely to actually be the case. I found both descriptions accurate for Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning... I will never look at racial discrimination again after reading this marvellous, ambitious, and clear-sighted book." - George Saunders, Financial Times, Best Books of 2017 "Ambitious, well-researched and worth the time of anyone who wants to understand racism." --Seattle Times "A deep (and often disturbing) chronicling of how anti-black thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of American society." --The Atlantic Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Bestseller On President Obama's Black History Month Recommended Reading List Finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, The Root, Buzzfeed, Bustle, and Entropy