Blackness at the End of the World

The Cambridge Companion to Black Edited by Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiv + 350 pp. $99.99 (cloth), $29.99 (paper).Do Black lives really matter? That is burning national question today. The follow-up retort that is also being raised is: Matter to whom? The names of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Gamer, Akai Gurley, and Tamir Rice have raised national conscience to such a level that there have been demonstrations and protests against racial injustice all over United States, and beyond, for several months. These are five Black men whose lives have been taken by white men, mainly police officers, without any judicial consequences. So, just as it is crucial to ask what it means to be Black, it is also very important to assess meaning and measure of Black religious experiences, cultural expressions, and socio-political expectations.The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology provides a valuable compendium of sources for a systematic attempt toward finding an authentic answer. It is valuable mainly since it offers theological reflections from a variety of contexts in which Black people world over continue to struggle for vital and viable alternatives to realities of status quo. Such realities include variations of social negation and cultural alienation, historical subjugation and exploitation, economic oppression, and industrial domination. These realities have traditionally been reinforced by conditions of persistent poverty, political dependence, and systemic injustice. This is why naming of those five Black men in previous paragraph has now become a national metaphor for what is patently wrong with our social order. Black people continue to be treated as the wretched of Earth, to use Franz Fanons famous phrase. I am still committed to proposition that Black people are only people on Earth whose claims to be fully human have not yet been universally acknowledged. Thus Companion introduces a range of historical, theological, thematic, and global insights that seek to bring reader into a fertile encounter with Theology from Other Side, rather than from Underside.The Companion is conveniently divided into three sections: Introduction, Themes in Black Theology, and Global Expressions of Black Theology. The introductory material lays out historical and theoretical antecedents of new theological enterprise, and seeks to align Black theological perspective with broader designs of liberation. The material links theological perspectives with modes of Black resistance and resilience in Africa and America, and draws some attention to encounters with some aspects of womanist theology, under guidance of one of its founders, Delores Williams. However, there is an absence of more pervasive forms of Black theological initiatives that have clearly demonstrated that such commonly held religious and spiritual notions have given rise to theologies of Protest (in striving to negate Negation), theologies of Affirmation (through song, spoken word, and mutual solidarity among people of color), and theologies of Transformation (through grassroots efforts to restore a sense of human dignity and social worth in organized groupings and other modes of civic advancement). This means that, far from classifying Black theology as a version of liberation theology, groundings of Black people s experiences throughout world have made it possible to generate modes of emancipatory proclamation and liberating praxis that have preceded any formulations of systematic canons, with intellectual surges and imaginative blessings of academic theologians.The traditional Christian doctrines, such as God, Christ, Holy Spirit, Sin, Theodicy, and Ecclesiology, are addressed in Black theological key. It is evident that contributors are obviously constrained to pay their respects to basic themes of classical theological formularies. …

Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., <i>We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85</i>. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. Pp. 320. $24.95 (paper).Terrion L. Williamson, <i>Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life</i>. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Pp. 128. $25.00 (paper).

W THE theological and cultural history of the sixties is written, the black renaissance will surely be considered one of the dominant factors in the period. Not only in civil rights but also in literature, history, culture, and theology, the black awakening has led to a new awareness of black peoplehood and personhood. From a theological standpoint the most striking aspects of this whole revolution have been the new appraisals of black religion and the emergence of a distinctive black theology. The catalytic book in the movement now appears to have been Joseph Washington's Black Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1964), which showed that there are elements of black history and church life which do not fit into the established categories of white theology, and that in fact white Christianity (in all of its diverse traditional forms) is sick unto death because of its deep intertwinings with paternalistic and/or oppressive societies. A second influential book which deepened the analysis of a distinctive black theology and which showed its affinities with the emerging mood of black militancy was James Cone's Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury, 1968). Cone condemned the black churches for so docilely having subscribed to the white man's faith and thereby reinforcing the tentacles of racism in American society. The advocates of black power, he argued, have a more realistic appraisal of the black condition and hence offer a more viable alternative to blacks for the elimination of oppression. Black theology attempts to read the Bible from the distinctive perspective of black suffering and thereby provides a bridge between the Christian heritage and black militancy. The search for an authentic, indigenous black theology quickly spread beyond Washington and Cone, and soon a considerable body of literature was emerging which was analyzing the black church and the black religious heritage in a new light. Washington's The Politics of God (Boston: Beacon, 1967) and Albert B. Cleage, Jr.'s The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968) received considerable attention, and Cone provided the first systematic exposition of a black theology in his A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970). The strident antiwhite posture of Cone made him the foremost interpreter of black theology and indeed a controversial figure even in the black community. Recently, however, two other attempts at a black

Currently, there is very little research and scholarship on spirituality and bisexuality in Black American life and culture. Although numerous books and essays on Black theology, Black liberation theology and spirituality exist, these collections’ singular focus remains on the politics of race. Only recently has there been a growing trend to study gender and sexuality as part of these theologies. Even then the attention to bisexuality in dominant models of religion and spirituality for Black Americans is rare. In this article, the author proposes that searching outside the typical configurations of spirituality unveils spiritual traditions that readily incorporate bisexuality for Black people in the United States. Specifically, I argue that the act of writing serves as an alternative spiritual tradition for Black intellectuals interested in deconstructing the false divides between spirituality, sexuality and the intellect. Analyzing the work of bell hooks, the author argues that writing as spirituality promotes and fosters bisexual subjectivity. This subjectivity creates mechanisms for combating sexual dysfunction in the lives of Black women.

The Third Revolution

Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Technology and Spirituality

The essay will address what I perceive to be a problem in Black liberation theology's descriptions of God, liberation, and Black experience. By linking, inextricably, God and liberation to Black resistance to White supremacy, Black liberation theology presents a roadblock to describing the diverse expressions of African American life. I contend that this theological roadblock commits hermeneutical violence to diverse Black communities by syndicating difference into racialized discourse. I wish to put forward a reading of sexual difference in Black life that presents the possibility of transcending what I believe to be static discourses regarding homosexuality that ground Black queers as an object to be pitied or as a challenge to the health of the Black body politic. While Black liberation theology attempts to make space for Black queers, I contend that its fixation upon Black experiences as bound by crisis cannot provide substantive theological resources for Black queers.

In section III of this book, I have suggested that humanism serves as a hermeneutic by which various life events and historical moments are unpacked and understood. In this chapter, I continue my work with humanism as hermeneutic and apply it to a vexing issue— sex(uality). Giving primary attention to the humanist principle of human central-ity and the sense of irreverence that marks the legacy of Nimrod, I chronicle the negative tension between religiosity and sexuality in the context of black religion and black theology. My goal is to present the nature of this tension and offer a way of better addressing sex(uality) within the context of black religious life and thought.2 I begin this discussion with attention to the historical context for current notions of black sex(uality).

In Beyond Ontological Blackness, Victor Anderson critiques Black theology as a theo-intellectual project whose ontological claims of blackness requires white racism and black crisis. Anderson asserts: In black theology, blackness has become a totality of meaning. It cannot point to any transcendent meaning beyond itself without also fragmenting. Because black life is fundamentally determined by black suffering and resistance to whiteness (the power of non-being), black existence is without the possibility of transcendence from the blackness that whiteness created. (1995, 91–92)

After the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, there has been a renewed movement in the United States and across the world in support of black lives. The movement, under the guiding framework of Black Lives Matter, has resulted in a national conversation on police brutality and racism, and the violent effects these have on the black body. Using the framework of black theological thought on the body, this paper identifies the many ways that racism, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “lands, with great violence, upon the body” across multiple domains and levels throughout history and across the life course. The paper closes with some initial recommendations for historically predominantly white churches to offer an anti-racist response to this violence, as informed by black theology.

The birth of black liberation and womanist theologies in the United States should not have been unexpected. The theological discourse oriented around liberation arose during a period in which African Americans were wrestling with the question of identity and culture in a society that seemed intractable in its racism, classism, and sexism. This discourse arose in a period when new voices in black life were emerging and not only critiquing and challenging racism and white supremacy but also providing active leadership that challenged the entrenched power structures that supported racism and white supremacy. Further, the emergence of a black theology of liberation was made possible by the nascent critiques of blackness coming out of the black power movement.KeywordsBlack WomanBlack CommunityBlack PeopleBlack ChurchWhite SupremacyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

One of the biggest challenges that confront Black people living in the UK is how to assess the veracity of the macro and micro contexts in which our lives are lived. In a country whose indices for what constitutes normality and acceptability are predicated on notions of "Whiteness," Black people have always needed to possess an armoury of experiential and psycho-social tools in order to discern how to live as a potent symbol of "otherness" within the body politic of the nation. This essay, which arises from engagement with a group of Black Methodists, seeks to demonstrate how the use of personal experience and the role of the spirit in Black life can lead to ways of being able to discern one's positionality within the broader world of White dominated Britain. The essay brings together reflections on Black theology, pneumatology and experiential learning in order to great a practical/participative Black theology for seeing and reinterpreting the reality of being Black in Britain.

This article is written by a descendant of enslaved Africans and explores the theological significance of Black bodies. Black bodies have been commodified, controlled and coerced by White hegemony, often lacking agency and self-determination. Using personal experience and contextual analysis, this article, drawing on Black theology inspired reflections, argues that we need to rethink how we conceive of Black bodies ethically, if Black lives are to really matter. The rehabilitation of Black bodies is achieved through a theological reappraisal of holiness and sacraments, underpinned by an embodied pneumatology, in which Black bodies are shown to be sacramental and worthy of mattering in a world underpinned by White supremacy.

After the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, there has been a renewed movement in the United States and across the world in support of black lives. The movement, under the guiding framework of Black Lives Matter, has resulted in a national conversation on police brutality and racism, and the violent effects these have on the black body. Using the framework of black theological thought on the body, this paper identifies the many ways that racism, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “lands, with great violence, upon the body” across multiple domains and levels throughout history and across the life course. The paper closes with some initial recommendations for historically predominantly white churches to offer an anti-racist response to this violence, as informed by black theology.

Is God a white racist? Posed by William R. Jones in his ground-breaking book of the same name, this question disrupted the theological assumptions that marked Black religious thought from early writings of the 1800s to the formation of Black theology in the 1960s. This book compiles his key and essential writings related to over three decades of critical reflection on race, religion, secularism, and oppression in the United States. Over the course of 30 years, Jones pushed questions and considerations that refined Black theology and that gave greater shape to and understanding of Black philosophers’ intervention into issues of racial and structural inequality. His philosophical work, related to the grid of oppression, fosters an approach to the nature and meaning of oppression in the United States, encouraging rational interrogation of structures of injustice and thought patterns supporting those structures. Still relevant today, the straightforward style of communication used by Jones makes these essays easily accessible to a popular audience, while maintaining intellectual rigor making the book also suitable for an academy-based audience.