FROM APATHY TO ACTIVISM: SOCIAL JUSTICE IN THE BLACK CHURCH


Book Description

This book is a critique of the black church’s response to the injustice within its community; it specifically examines the author’s own church, it’s focal points upon his arrival and the changes implemented in addressing the mindset of the churches leaders and lay person.




From Apathy to Activism


Book Description

This book is a critique of the black church's response to the injustice within its community; it specifically examines the author's own church, it's focal points upon his arrival and the changes implemented in addressing the mindset of the churches leaders and lay person.




The Future Horizon for a Prophetic Tradition


Book Description

In this book David Everett examines how Church has changed throughout a modern/postmodern context. Everett explores how social gospel dimensions and prophetic radicalism have diminished in a way that it might reestablish itself as a pillar in the community through a retrieval of its prophetic voice and social gospel roots so that it to might be missional-minded and civically-engage. Everett anticipates that this perspective will assist the Black Church in the reclamation of its heritage by confirming its purpose and affirming its position within the missional context that God has placed it.




Screening Social Justice


Book Description

In Screening Social Justice, award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner presents an ethnographic study of Brave New Films, a nonprofit film production company that makes documentaries intended to mobilize progressive grassroots activism. Ortner positions the work of the company within a tradition of activist documentary filmmaking and within the larger field of “alternative media” that is committed to challenging the mainstream media and telling the truth about the world today. The company’s films cover a range of social justice issues, with particular focus on the hidden workings of capitalism, racism, and right-wing extremism. Beyond the films themselves, Brave New Films is also famous for its creative distribution strategies. All of the films are available for free on YouTube. Central to the intention of promoting political activism, the films circulate through networks of other activist and social justice organizations and are shown almost entirely in live screenings in which the power of the film is amplified. Ortner takes the reader inside both the production process and the screenings to show how a film can be made and used to mobilize action for a better world.




Economic Ethics & the Black Church


Book Description

This book examines the relationship between race, religion, and economics within the black church. The book features unheard voices of individuals experiencing economic deprivation and the faith communities who serve as their refuge. Thus, this project examines the economic ethics of black churches in the rural South whose congregants and broader communities have long struggled amidst persistent poverty. Through a case study of communities in Alabama's Black Belt, this book argues that if the economic ethic of the Black Church remains accommodationist, it will continue to become increasingly irrelevant to communities that experience persistent poverty. Despite its historic role in combatting racial oppression and social injustice, the Church has also perpetuated ideologies that uncritically justify unjust social structures. Wilson shows how the Church can shift the conversation and reality of poverty by moving from a legacy of accommodationism and toward a legacy of empowering liberating economic ethics.




To Love the Wind and the Rain


Book Description

"To Love the Wind and the Rain" is a groundbreaking and vivid analysis of the relationship between African Americans and the environment in U.S. history. It focuses on three major themes: African Americans in the rural environment, African Americans in the urban and suburban environments, and African Americans and the notion of environmental justice. Meticulously researched, the essays cover subjects including slavery, hunting, gardening, religion, the turpentine industry, outdoor recreation, women, and politics. "To Love the Wind and the Rain" will serve as an excellent foundation for future studies in African American environmental history.




Walk Together Children


Book Description

Walk Together Children: Black and Womanist Theologies, Church, and Theological Education draws on the long religious, cultural, and singing history of blacks in the U.S.A. Through the slavery and emancipation days until now, black song has both nurtured and enhanced African American life as a collective whole. Communality has always included a variety of existential experiences. What has kept this enduring people in a corporate process is their walking together through good times and bad, relying on what W. E. B. DuBois called their "dogged strength" to keep "from being torn asunder." Somehow and someway they intuited from historical memory or received from transcendental revelation that keeping on long enough on the road would yield ultimate fruit for the journey.




The Origins of Black Humanism in America


Book Description

By examining the minister who helped inspire the founding of the Harlem Unitarian Church Reverend Ethelred Brown, Floyd-Thomas offers a provocative examination of the religious and intellectual roots of Black humanist thought.




The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice


Book Description

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice brings together a team of distinguished scholars to provide a comprehensive and comparative account of social justice in the major religious traditions. The first publication to offer a comparative study of social justice for each of the major world religions, exploring viewpoints within Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism Offers a unique and enlightening volume for those studying religion and social justice - a crucially important subject within the history of religion, and a significant area of academic study in the field Brings together the beliefs of individual traditions in a comprehensive, explanatory, and informative style All essays are newly-commissioned and written by eminent scholars in the field Benefits from a distinctive four-part organization, with sections on major religions; religious movements and themes; indigenous people; and issues of social justice, from colonialism to civil rights, and AIDS through to environmental concerns




Change Agent Church in Black Lives Matter Times


Book Description

Volatile social dissonance in America’s urban landscape is the backdrop as Valerie A. Miles-Tribble examines tensions in ecclesiology and public theology, focusing on theoethical dilemmas that complicate churches’ public justice witness as prophetic change agents. She attributes churches’ reticence to confront unjust disparities to conflicting views, for example, of Black Lives Matter protests as “mere politics,” and disparities in leader and congregant preparation for public justice roles. As a practical theologian with experience in organizational leadership, Miles-Tribble applies adaptive change theory, public justice theory, and a womanist communitarian perspective, engaging Emilie Townes’s construct of cultural evil as she presents a model of social reform activism re-envisioned as public discipleship. She contends that urban churches are urgently needed to embrace active prophetic roles and thus increase public justice witness. “Black Lives Matter times” compel churches to connect faith with public roles as spiritual catalysts of change.