This probing work examines how African-American slaves, through their appropriation of Christianity, found a resource that affirmed their sense of self-worth and identity, and a spirit of community that offered psychological and spiritual resistance to oppression. White evangelists extolled the benefits of converting slaves to Christianity, but the slaves discovered in the Bible a different message, shared among themselves in "dark symbols and obscure signs".

Although Henry Louis Gates examined the ways in which African slave language formed the metaphors for African American poetry and fiction in The Signifying Monkey, there have been no studies of the theological and ethical significance of the salutations of black Americans until now. In Dark Salutations, Riggins Earl examines black American's ethnocentric verbalized salutary expressions-"brotherman" and "sistergirl," for example-that dominate their ritualistic moments of social encounter. The noticeable religious content of some of these salutations drives us to examine blacks' understandings of God and brother/sisterhood challenges: Is God a respecter of persons? Or, have black people understood God to be "faithfully for them and with them" politically and spiritually? Have black people understood themselves to be "trustfully for and with" each other spiritually and politically? Have black people understood themselves to be "trustfully for and with" even the whites who oppressed them? Earl argues that these salutary expressions show how blacks have lived with the burdensome challenge of having to prove their sisterly and brotherly capacities, and with the insatiable desire to be treated as equal siblings in the family of God. .

Of all mankinds' vices, racism is one of the most pervasive and stubborn. Success in overcoming racism has been achieved from time to time, but victories have been limited thus far because mankind has focused on personal economic gain or power grabs ignoring generosity of the soul. This bibliography brings together the literature.

Frederick L. Ware provides a classification and criticism of methodological perspectives in the academic study, interpretation, and construction of black theology in the U.S. from 1969 to the present, and establishes and recognizes three different schools of academic black theology: The Black Hermeneutical School The Black Philosophical School The Human Sciences School Similarities and differences are delineated in the identification of each school's representative thinkers and their views on the tasks, content, sources, norm, method, and goals of black theology.

No serious scholar in biblical studies today can introduce students to his or her field without taking into account the contributions of African American scholarship. The long traditions of biblical interpretation in the Black Church, and the innovative research and writing performed by African American scholars in recent years are now essential components of a critical study of the Bible. Up to now, knowing how best to introduce the fruits of African American biblical scholarship to students has been difficult. Good resources exist, yet too often they are not written with the needs of introductory students in mind. This book meets that need by providing an overview of the most important developments in African American approaches to biblical scholarship. It offers insight into the particular ways that African American scholarship has shaped the world of biblical study.

Since its start in 1966, black liberation theology in the United States has continually engaged international developments with Africa and the entire world. But after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, there has been an almost twenty-year break in books on black theology and international affairs. Black Theology--Essays on Global Perspectives bridges that post-1990 gap and makes a vital contact with Africa again. This book conceptualizes black theology to take on the global reconfigurations and opportunities brought about by the rapidly shrinking earth of fast-paced, worldwide contacts. In other words, in the specificity of the genealogy of black theology, we need to reforge ties with Africa. This claim is based on tradition. And in the generality of the larger worldwide intertwining of technologies and economics, we need a new type of black theological leadership for the twenty-first century. This claim is based on today's international challenges. The essays in this book draw on tradition and point forward in the midst of today's worldwide challenges and favorable possibilities, given the closeness of all nations and the varieties of cultures.

This book concentrates on six neo-slave narratives written by late 20th and early 21st century black American women: Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata and A Sunday in June, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, Joan California Cooper’s Family, and Athena Lark’s Avenue of Palms. It explores the process of re(-)membering of the black female characters in these novels, and shows how these authors manage to both write the transgenerational trauma of slavery and write through it, enabling black American women’s voices to be heard. This analysis of famous classics, as well as less-known books, demonstrates how black American women’s traumatic memory of slavery is inscribed in a transgenerational black female body. Conjuring up questions of narratology and intertextuality, it highlights how working-through takes the form of a narrativization of this traumatic memory by diverse means. This book also reflects upon the links between the collective and personal psyches by laying emphasis on the ineluctable intertwining of national history and individual destiny.

Schweitzer?s goal in this book is to explore what postmodernity actually means for theology and how theology and the church may respond to its challenges. He focuses on the life cycle as it is changing with the advent of postmodernity, looking sequentially at segments of the life cycle using different lenses: modernity, postmodernity, and responses from church and theology. Schweitzer concludes with a theology of the life cycle.

This work is concerned with the way Black Christian formation, because of the acceptance of universal, absolute, and exclusive Christian doctrines, seems to justify and even encourage anti-African sentiment.