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.

This text seeks to address the issue of education for African-American Catholics. The book argues for reform in Catholic higher education, suggesting that particular attention be paid to the inclusion and integration of the African-American experience in Catholic theology.

Divided into five interrelated themes - sources and contexts traditions and methods, pedagogy and practice, ethnicity, race and Catholic studies, and the Catholic imagination - the editors provide readers with the opportunity to understand the great diversity within this area of study

Introduces the challenge of Black Catholics to theology and the church. Contributors examine where Black Catholics have come from and where their futures lie in a church in which they see themselves as co-participants.

Explores the contentious debates among Black Catholics about the proper relationship between religious practice and racial identity Chicago has been known as the Black Metropolis. But before the Great Migration, Chicago could have been called the Catholic Metropolis, with its skyline defined by parish spires as well as by industrial smoke stacks and skyscrapers. This book uncovers the intersection of the two. Authentically Black and Truly Catholic traces the developments within the church in Chicago to show how Black Catholic activists in the 1960s and 1970s made Black Catholicism as we know it today. The sweep of the Great Migration brought many Black migrants face-to-face with white missionaries for the first time and transformed the religious landscape of the urban North. The hopes migrants had for their new home met with the desires of missionaries to convert entire neighborhoods. Missionaries and migrants forged fraught relationships with one another and tens of thousands of Black men and women became Catholic in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a result. These Black Catholic converts saved failing parishes by embracing relationships and ritual life that distinguished them from the evangelical churches proliferating around them. They praised the “quiet dignity” of the Latin Mass, while distancing themselves from the gospel choirs, altar calls, and shouts of “amen!” increasingly common in Black evangelical churches. Their unique rituals and relationships came under intense scrutiny in the late 1960s, when a growing group of Black Catholic activists sparked a revolution in U.S. Catholicism. Inspired by both Black Power and Vatican II, they fought for the self-determination of Black parishes and the right to identify as both Black and Catholic. Faced with strong opposition from fellow Black Catholics, activists became missionaries of a sort as they sought to convert their coreligionists to a distinctively Black Catholicism. This book brings to light the complexities of these debates in what became one of the most significant Black Catholic communities in the country, changing the way we view the history of American Catholicism.

In May 1962, as the struggle for civil rights heated up in the United States and leaders of the Catholic Church prepared to meet for Vatican Council II, Pope John XXIII named the first black saint of the Americas, the Peruvian Martín de Porres (1579–1639), and designated him the patron of racial justice. The son of a Spanish father and a former slavewoman from Panamá, Martín served a lifetime as the barber and nurse at the great Dominican monastery in Lima. This book draws on visual representations of Martín and the testimony of his contemporaries to produce the first biography of this pious and industrious black man from the cosmopolitan capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The book vividly chronicles the evolving interpretations of his legend and his miracles, and traces the centuries-long campaign to formally proclaim Martín de Porres a hero of universal Catholicism.

Before there was an immigrant American Church, there was a Native American Church. The Native American Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the story of how Native American Catholicism has developed over the centuries, beginning with the age of the missions and leading to inculturated, indigenous forms of religious expression. Though the Native-Christian relationship could be marked by tension, coercion, and even violence, the Christian faith took root among Native Americans and for those who accepted it and bequeathed it to future generations it became not an imposition, but a way of expressing Native identity. From the perspective of historians and theologians, the Native American Catholic Studies Reader offers a curated collection of essays divided into three sections: education and evangelization; tradition and transition; and Native American lives. Contributors include scholars currently working in the field: Mark Clatterbuck, Damian Costello, Conor J. Donnan, Ross Enochs, Allan Greer, Mark G. Thiel, and Christopher Vecsey, as well as selections from a past generation: Gerald McKevitt, SJ, and Carl F. Starkloff, SJ. These contributions explore the interaction of missionaries and tribal leaders, the relationship of traditional Native cosmology and religiosity to Christianity, and the role of geography and tribal consciousness in accepting and maintaining indigenous and religious identities. These readings highlight the state of the emergent field of Native-Catholic studies and suggest further avenues for research and publication. For scholars, teachers, and students, the Native American Catholic Studies Reader explores how the faith of the American Church’s eldest members became a means of expressing and celebrating language, family, and tribe.

2020 Catholic Press Association second place award, best new religious book series With every passing year since her death in 1990, more people are recognizing Sister Thea Bowman as one of the most inspiring figures in American Catholic history. This granddaughter of slaves became Catholic on her own initiative at the age of nine. As a Franciscan sister, she lived a wide-ranging ministry of joy, music, and justice. Now Father Maurice Nutt offers a new biography of Sister Thea that introduces her and sheds new light on who she was. Drawing on careful research and the insights of people who were close to her, Nutt explores her personality, her passion, her mission, and her prayer. He captures Thea Bowman as she was: an unapologetically African American woman, a religious sister who deeply loved God and the people to whom she ministered through teaching, preaching, and singing, and who embraced the blessing of her ancestry, the wisdom of the "old folks," and a passion for justice and equality for all God's children.

In May of 1890, The Christian Solider, an African American newspaper, identified the Catholic journalist and activist Daniel Arthur Rudd as the “greatest negro Catholic in America.” Yet many Catholics today are unaware of Rudd's efforts to bring about positive social change during the early decades of the Jim Crow era. In Daniel Rudd: Calling a Church to Justice, Gary Agee offers a compelling look at the life and work of this visionary who found inspiration in his Catholic faith to fight for the principles of liberty and justice. Born into slavery, Rudd achieved success early on as the publisher of the American Catholic Tribune, one of the most successful black newspapers of its era, and as the founder of the National Black Catholic Congress. Even as Rudd urged his fellow black Catholics to maintain their spiritual home within the fold of the Catholic Church, he called on that same church to live up what he believed to be her cardinal teaching, "the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man." Rudd’s hopeful spirit lives on today in the important work of the National Black Catholic Congress, as it carries forward his pursuit of social justice.

"This study of Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota subject of the bestselling Black Elk Speaks, challenges the assumptions of many scholars - both those who claim that Black Elk was a Lakota holy man first and foremost and those who maintain that he abandoned his Lakota tradition after converting to Catholicism." "Arguing from a post-colonial perspective, author Damien Costello deconstructs modern Western assumptions and shows that Black Elk was an active agent, and that his conversion was in continuity with the dynamics of Lakota culture and provided new power to challenge the dominance of colonialism. As a consequence, Black Elk the Lakota holy man and Black Elk the Lakota catechist remembered by his community were not contradictory but one consistent agent fighting for the survival of his people in a colonial world infringing on the Lakota, their lands, and their traditions."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved