› › Black Religious Intellectuals

Black Religious Intellectuals

Author : Clarence Taylor

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 254 pages

File Size : 12,77 MB

Release : 2013-04-15

Category : History

ISBN : 1136061789

Get eBook

Book Description

Professor Clarence Taylor sheds some much-needed light on the rich intellectual and political tradition that lies in the black religious community. From the Pentecostalism of Bishop Smallwood Williams and the flamboyant leadership of the Reverend Al Sharpton, to the radical Presbyterianism of Milton Arthur Galamison and the controversial and mass-mobilization by Minister Louis Farrakhan, black religious leaders have figured prominently in the struggle for social equality in America.



Black Freethinkers

Author : Christopher Cameron

Publisher : Critical Insurgencies

Page : 248 pages

File Size : 40,96 MB

Release : 2019-09-15

Category : History

ISBN : 9780810140790

Get eBook

Book Description

Black Freethinkers is the first study to offer a comprehensive historical treatment of African American freethought (including atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism) from the nineteenth century to the present.



Black Freethinkers

Author : Christopher Cameron

Publisher : Northwestern University Press

Page : 349 pages

File Size : 23,29 MB

Release : 2019-09-15

Category : History

ISBN : 0810140802

Get eBook

Book Description

Black Freethinkers argues that, contrary to historical and popular depictions of African Americans as naturally religious, freethought has been central to black political and intellectual life from the nineteenth century to the present. Freethought encompasses many different schools of thought, including atheism, agnosticism, and nontraditional orientations such as deism and paganism. Christopher Cameron suggests an alternative origin of nonbelief and religious skepticism in America, namely the brutality of the institution of slavery. He also traces the growth of atheism and agnosticism among African Americans in two major political and intellectual movements of the 1920s: the New Negro Renaissance and the growth of black socialism and communism. In a final chapter, he explores the critical importance of freethought among participants in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Examining a wealth of sources, including slave narratives, travel accounts, novels, poetry, memoirs, newspapers, and archival sources such as church records, sermons, and letters, the study follows the lives and contributions of well-known figures, including Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, as well as lesser-known thinkers such as Louise Thompson Patterson, Sarah Webster Fabio, and David Cincore.



The Black Intellectual Tradition

Author : Derrick P. Alridge

Publisher : University of Illinois Press

Page : 447 pages

File Size : 40,79 MB

Release : 2021-08-03

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0252052757

Get eBook

Book Description

Considering the development and ongoing influence of Black thought From 1900 to the present, people of African descent living in the United States have drawn on homegrown and diasporic minds to create a Black intellectual tradition engaged with ideas on race, racial oppression, and the world. This volume presents essays on the diverse thought behind the fight for racial justice as developed by African American artists and intellectuals; performers and protest activists; institutions and organizations; and educators and religious leaders. By including both women’s and men’s perspectives from the U.S. and the Diaspora, the essays explore the full landscape of the Black intellectual tradition. Throughout, contributors engage with important ideas ranging from the consideration of gender within the tradition, to intellectual products generated outside the intelligentsia, to the ongoing relationship between thought and concrete effort in the quest for liberation. Expansive in scope and interdisciplinary in practice, The Black Intellectual Tradition delves into the ideas that animated a people’s striving for full participation in American life. Contributors: Derrick P. Alridge, Keisha N. Blain, Cornelius L. Bynum, Jeffrey Lamar Coleman, Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, Stephanie Y. Evans, Aaron David Gresson III, Claudrena N. Harold, Leonard Harris, Maurice J. Hobson, La TaSha B. Levy, Layli Maparyan, Zebulon V. Miletsky, R. Baxter Miller, Edward Onaci, Venetria K. Patton, James B. Stewart, and Nikki M. Taylor



The Burden of Black Religion

Author : Curtis J. Evans

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 393 pages

File Size : 13,90 MB

Release : 2008-04-17

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0199716544

Get eBook

Book Description

Religion has always been a focal element in the long and tortured history of American ideas about race. In The Burden of Black Religion, Curtis Evans traces ideas about African American religion from the antebellum period to the middle of the twentieth century. Central to the story, he argues, was the deep-rooted notion that blacks were somehow "naturally" religious. At first, this assumed natural impulse toward religion served as a signal trait of black people's humanity -- potentially their unique contribution to American culture. Abolitionists seized on this point, linking black religion to the black capacity for freedom. Soon, however, these first halting steps toward a multiracial democracy were reversed. As Americans began to value reason, rationality, and science over religious piety, the idea of an innate black religiosity was used to justify preserving the inequalities of the status quo. Later, social scientists -- both black and white -- sought to reverse the damage caused by these racist ideas and in the process proved that blacks were in fact fully capable of incorporation into white American culture. This important work reveals how interpretations of black religion played a crucial role in shaping broader views of African Americans and had real consequences in their lives. In the process, Evans offers an intellectual and cultural history of race in a crucial period of American history.



Christianity on Trial

Author : Mark L. Chapman

Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers

Page : 225 pages

File Size : 49,2 MB

Release : 2006-02-02

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1597525561

Get eBook

Book Description

Since slavery times African-American religious thinkers have struggled to answer this question: Is Christianity a source of liberation or a source of oppression? In a study that reviews representative thinkers over the last fifty years, Mark Chapman reviews the variety of ways that African-Americans have addressed this problem and how it has informed their work and lives. Beginning with Benjamin Mays, the leading Negro theologian of the post-World War II period, Chapman explores the critical implications of this question right up to the present day. The pivotal turning point in this period is the emergence of the Black Power movement in the 1960s. Sparked in part by the challenge of the Black Muslims, for whom Christianity was simply the white man's religion, inherently racist and oppressive, the era of Black Power saw the rise of militant Black theologies as well. After analyzing the work of the Muslim Elijah Muhammad, Chapman turns to the pioneering work of Black theologians Albert Cleage and James H. Cone. Chapman demonstrates the differences but also uncovers surprising lines of continuity between the older Negro theologians and the later Black theologians, particularly in their efforts to uncover the truly liberative potential of Christianity. 'Christianity on Trial' concludes by exploring the recent emergence of womanist theology. As articulated by Delores S. Williams and other African-American women, womanist theology challenges not only the patriarchal aspects of historical Christianity, but the same limitations in previous Black theologies.



Theology for a Violent Age

Author : Woody Carter Ph. D.

Publisher : iUniverse

Page : 170 pages

File Size : 20,61 MB

Release : 2010-12

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1450246060

Get eBook

Book Description

Any politician or pundit will agree: we live in a violent and dangerous age. Our pent-up anger and rage fills our households and spills over into our neighborhoods and streets, leaving African American families who live in poverty and with limited capability to ward off shame and self-contempt as its unfortunate victims. ADVANCED PRAISE FOR THEOLOGY FOR A VIOLENT AGE "There are many ideas in this little volume and they are meaningful. They set the stage for an interpretation of certain African American youth and by implication other youth who are similarly situated in American Society." ARCHIE SMITH, Jr., PhD James and Clarice Foster Professor of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling, Pacific School of Religion "In attempting to uncover the self-knowledge of African American people as reflected in Black dramatic literature as 'conviction' or secular theology, Woody Carter simultaneously reveals the dominant forces that influence Black life and the critical necessity to 'stand on our own (African) cultural ground.' All Black thinkers, from intellectuals and scholars to teachers, preachers and parents to mental health workers, futurist and community activist, who have struggled with the dilemma of DuBois's double consciousness and the significance of religion in the Black community, both of which I believe have never been properly understood, will find Theology for a Violent Age informative, insightful, and a strong provocation and challenge for the reader to continue to seek the core essence of being Black and the searchlights necessary to envision our full humanity as more than reactions to white supremacy and racial domination and oppression. Theology for a Violent Age is deserving of a critical read and methodical application against the problems of our time." DR. WADE W. NOBLES Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University; Executive Director, The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life & Culture; Co-Founder and Past President, Association of Black Psychologists and author of Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational Readings in African Psychology, Third World Press. Chicago, 2009



Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America

Author : Michael L. Ondaatje

Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press

Page : 227 pages

File Size : 38,56 MB

Release : 2011-11-29

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0812206878

Get eBook

Book Description

In the last three decades, a brand of black conservatism espoused by a controversial group of African American intellectuals has become a fixture in the nation's political landscape, its proponents having shaped policy debates over some of the most pressing matters that confront contemporary American society. Their ideas, though, have been neglected by scholars of the African American experience—and much of the responsibility for explaining black conservatism's historical and contemporary significance has fallen to highly partisan journalists. Typically, those pundits have addressed black conservatives as an undifferentiated mass, proclaiming them good or bad, right or wrong, color-blind visionaries or Uncle Toms. In Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, Michael L. Ondaatje delves deeply into the historical archive to chronicle the origins of black conservatism in the United States from the early 1980s to the present. Focusing on three significant policy issues—affirmative action, welfare, and education—Ondaatje critically engages with the ideas of nine of the most influential black conservatives. He further documents how their ideas were received, both by white conservatives eager to capitalize on black support for their ideas and by activists on the left who too often sought to impugn the motives of black conservatives instead of challenging the merits of their claims. While Ondaatje's investigation uncovers the themes and issues that link these voices together, he debunks the myth of a monolithic black conservatism. Figures such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, and cultural theorist John McWhorter emerge as individuals with their own distinct understandings of and relationships to the conservative political tradition.



New World A-Coming

Author : Judith Weisenfeld

Publisher : NYU Press

Page : 357 pages

File Size : 40,26 MB

Release : 2018-11-06

Category : History

ISBN : 1479865850

Get eBook

Book Description

"When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or raceless children of God. Rejecting conventional American racial classification, many black southern migrants and immigrants from the Caribbean embraced these alternative visions of black history, racial identity, and collective future, thereby reshaping the black religious and racial landscape. Focusing on the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and a number of congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews, Judith Weisenfeld argues that the appeal of these groups lay not only in the new religious opportunities membership provided, but also in the novel ways they formulated a religio-racial identity. Arguing that members of these groups understood their religious and racial identities as divinely-ordained and inseparable, the book examines how this sense of self shaped their conceptions of their bodies, families, religious and social communities, space and place, and political sensibilities. Weisenfeld draws on extensive archival research and incorporates a rich array of sources to highlight the experiences of average members."--Publisher's description.



Your Spirits Walk Beside Us

Author : Barbara Dianne Savage

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 368 pages

File Size : 23,72 MB

Release : 2009-06-30

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0674043111

Get eBook

Book Description

Even before the emergence of the civil rights movement, African American religion and progressive politics were assumed to be inextricably intertwined. Savage counters this assumption with the story of a highly diversified religious community whose debates over engagement in the struggle for racial equality were as vigorous as they were persistent.