African American Religious Thought

An Anthology

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Edited by Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude

Westminster John Knox Press

Due/Published January 2004, 1080 pages, paper

ISBN 0664224598

Believing that African American religious studies has reached a crossroads, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude seek, in this anthology, to steer the discipline into the future. Arguing that the complexity of beliefs, choices, and actions of African Americans need not be reduced to expressions of black religion, West and Glaude call for more careful reflection on the complex relationships of African American religious studies to conceptions of class, gender, sexual orientation, race, empire, and other values that continue to challenge our democratic ideals.

"We have organized this book, in some ways, to tell a story about what black agents have done and made in light of the historical conditions that give their beliefs, choices, and actions meaningÉ.We hold the view that African American religious studies at its best tries to make theoretically explicit what is implicit in history, to describe and demystify cultural and social practices and offer solutions to urgent problems besetting African Americans." -- from the Introduction

Review

The editors of this impressive new collection provide a wide-ranging and thoughtful selection of essays addressing African American religious thought and history. In a variety of useful and provocative ways, this anthology lives up to its promise to “tell a story about what black agents have done and made in light of the historical conditions that give their beliefs, choices, and actions meaning.” Thus, the essays explore how African American religious thought and institutions have responded and contributed to such historical circumstances as slavery, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement. The contributors consider how black religion has developed in relationship to American ideology and international movements. The essays also explore African American responses to sexism, homophobia, and class divisions. Collecting a range of classic and contemporary texts, this collection provides insight into the historical, theological, and sociological aspects of black religion.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham writes, “African American Religious Thought does a great service to the study of American religion and, in particular, to African American religious history. Eddie Glaude and Cornel West have produced the first truly comprehensive collection of classic and recent writings, providing a much-needed window into the breadth and depth of African American religious life.”

Essays include:

• “Of the Faith of the Fathers,” W. E. B. Du Bois
• “The Negro Church and Assimilation,” E. Franklin Frazier
• “American Africans: Alienation in an Insecure Culture,” Cornel West
• “Authority, Alienation, and Social Death,” Orlando Patterson
• “The Racial Factor in the Shaping of Religion,” C. Eric Lincoln
• “The Black Church: A Gender Perspective,” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
• “Black Conversion and White Sensibility,” Eugene Genovese
• “Of the Black Church and the Making of a Black Public,” Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
• “‘Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands’: Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America,” Albert J. Raboteau
• “Chosen Peoples of the Metropolis: Black Muslims, Black Jews, and Others,” Wilson Jeremiah Moses
• “‘Together and in Harness’: Women’s Traditions in the Sanctified Church,” Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
• “Reverend George Washington Woodbey: Early Twentieth-Century California Black Socialist,” Philip S. Foner
• “From the Luminous Darkness,” Howard Thurman
• “The Religion of Black Power,” Vincent Harding
• “Intergrationism and Nationalism in African-American Intellectual History,” James Cone
• “Slave Theology in the ‘Invisible Institution,’” Dwight N. Hopkins
• “Ontological Blackness in Theology,” Victor Anderson
• “Jesse Jackson and the Symbolic Politics of Black Christendom,” James Melvin Washington
• “Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Black Church and Community,” Kelly Brown Douglas