2024-2025 New Publications

Confronting Racism and White Supremacy in the US: Twenty-First-Century Theological Perspectives is a collection of essays on contemporary issues in the ongoing fight against racial oppression and inequality in the US. Edited by Michael R. Fisher Jr., it includes contributions from ecumenical leaders, scholars of religion, and activists with insights about the role religion can and must play in advancing justice and equity. Originating with the Faith and Order Table of the National Council of Churches, this book offers constructive theological reflection for resisting racism and white supremacy.

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When Zora Neale Hurston traveled to New Orleans, she encountered a religious underworld, a beautiful anarchy of spiritual life. In Underworld Work, Ahmad Greene-Hayes follows Hurston on a journey through the rich tapestry of Black religious expression from emancipation through Jim Crow. He looks within and beyond the church to recover the diverse leadership of migrants, healers, dissidents, and queer people who transformed their marginalized homes, bars, and street corners into sacred space.  Greene-Hayes shows how, while enclosed within an anti-black world, these outcasts embraced Africana esotericisms—ancestral veneration, faith healing, spiritualized sex work, and more—to conjure a connection to freer worlds past and yet to come.

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This captivating study engages two of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century: Karl Barth, the Swiss Protestant theologian who constructed his theology “from above” and engaged the powers in the background of Nazi Germany, and James H. Cone, the father of Black Theology in America, who constructed his theology “from below” and confronted white racism—the most intractable issue in America’s history. In this three-volume project, Carr employs the aesthetic thinking of the jazz legend Thelonious Monk to reconceptualize, restructure, and advance the theologies of Barth and Cone. This first volume appeals to the Bebop tune “Epistrophy” as the analogical framework for (re)conceptualizing the historical form and hermeneutical backgrounds of Karl Barth and James H. Cone.

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Drawing upon her grandmother's personal struggles with physical "bendedness" and the narrative of the bent woman in Luke 13:10-17, Melanie Jones Quarles engages Black religious thought and cultural criticism to expose how the Black Church paradoxically nurtures Black women while also sustaining their oppression. Quarles mines the prophetic imaginations of influential womanist thinkers, crafting a liberating vision that resists serving as surrogate "saviors" in society and religion. 

With insights into politics, Christology, and biblical interpretation, this book boldly calls Black women to unbend their bodies and reclaim their moral agency in the face of crooked systems that attempt to constrain their freedom.

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In Freeing Black Girls, Tamura Lomax offers an insurgent feminist love letter to Black girls, women, mothers, and othermothers. Exploring what it means to mother Black children in the twenty-first century, Lomax shares her journey from her traditionalist Black girlhood to finding the path to revolutionary Black motherhood. Along the way, she shows how all Black people are endangered by white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal dominance and emphasizes the power of looking and talking back. Lomax insists on Black feminist ways of living that value and nourish whole persons, sketching a radical dream that will allow Black women and girls to survive America while being able to love themselves, others, and collective Black freedom.

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In Critical Race Theology Juan Floyd-Thomas examines the entangled roots of white supremacy, white Christian nationalism, and the raging culture wars in America. In this provocative and courageous work Floyd-Thomas charts a path for a revitalized social gospel for the 21st century.

Drawing insights from critical race theory, Black liberation theology, and prophetic Christianity, Floyd-Thomas proposes “critical race theology” as a framework to confront racism, exclusion, and oppression within American Christianity and society. Challenging the self-righteous distortions of conservatives, he calls on clergy and believers to truly embody the liberating spirit of Jesus's radical ethic of love.

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In this third volume of a three-volume lectionary, widely praised womanist bible scholar and priest Wilda Gafney selects scripture readings that emphasize women's stories. Focusing especially on the Gospel of Luke, Year C of A Women's Lectionary features Gafney's fresh, inclusive, and thought-provoking translations of every reading, alongside commentary on each reading. Designed for liturgical use or scriptural study, this resource offers a new perspective on the Bible and the liturgical year.

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This volume focuses on women and girls in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. As in her successful and widely read first volume, Gafney uses her own translations and offers midrashic interpretations of the biblical text rooted in the African American preaching and rabbinic traditions to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Grounded in rigorous scholarship, this volume employs solid womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Afro-Asiatic world, expanding conversations of and about biblical interpretation.Pre-Order here: Gafney

What does it mean to be a Black humanist? What do Black humanist believe, and what do they do? This slim volume answers these questions. Animated by 6 central principles, and discussed in terms of its history, practices, formations, and community rituals, this book argues that Black humanism can be understood as a religious movement. Pinn makes a distinction between theism and religion—which is simply a tool for examining, naming, and finding the meaning in human experience.

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In Black, Quare, and Then to Where jennifer susanne leath explores the relationship between Afrodiasporic theories of justice and Black sexual ethics through a womanist engagement with Maât the ancient Egyptian deity of justice and truth. Maât took into account the historical and cultural context of each human’s life, thus encompassing nuances of politics, race, gender, and sexuality. Arguing that Maât should serve as a foundation for reconfiguring Black sexual ethics, leath applies ancient Egyptian moral codes to quare ethics of the erotic, expanding what relationships and democratic practices might look like from a contemporary Maâtian perspective.

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In The Wounds Are the Witness, Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School and author of In My Grandmother's House, weaves together her own memories, vignettes from Black life, and scenes from scripture, especially the passion of Christ. To work for liberation in a broken world, we cannot look away from crucified flesh. Bones from the Middle Passage, GI Bill benefits denied to Black veterans, women inmates shackled while giving birth: we must take all such wounds seriously. They testify to both the pain and the faith of a people.

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Although much Black religious scholarship has engaged with feminist theory and womanist thought, a gap remains where little work has been done in religious studies to investigate the Black male experience. A Misrepresented People explores how African American men grapple with identity and masculinity in relation to Black religious thought. This book counters the dominant portrayal of Black men in American society as suspicious, morally defective, and irredeemable, and showcases the strength and relevance of Black religious thought in developing alternative notions of Black manhood.

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What does it mean to be a Black humanist? What do Black humanist believe, and what do they do? This slim volume answers these questions. Animated by 6 central principles, and discussed in terms of its history, practices, formations, and community rituals, this book argues that Black humanism can be understood as a religious movement. Pinn makes a distinction between theism and religion—which is simply a tool for examining, naming, and finding the meaning in human experience.

Pre-order here: Pinn

The Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement spotlights the perspectives of individual participants who contributed to the movement’s revived impact and global success throughout 2020. Authors Andre E. Johnson and Amanda Nell Edgar interview the movement’s activists—from seasoned organizers to first-time protesters—to discover what Black Lives Matter meant to those who participated in one of America’s largest social movements. 

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 What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative
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Sarah F. Farmer amplifies the voices of women who are or have been incarcerated to learn what supports their flourishing. Combining theology and sociology, Farmer shows how theological education can help cultivate the resilience and connection that women describe as life-giving in and after prison. Based in her own ministry, this pedagogy incorporates artistic expression and critical thinking about justice to cultivate agency. 
 

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Teaching to Live: Black Religion, Activist-Educators, and Radical Social Change interrogates the stories of African American activist-educators whose faith convictions inspired them to educate in radical and transformative ways. Many of these educators are known only or primarily for their educational theory or activism, and their religious convictions have often been obscured or outright ignored. Almeda M. Wright seeks to rectify this omission, exploring the connections between religion, education, and struggles for freedom within twentieth-century African American communities by telling the stories of key African American teachers.

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This book seeks to humanize people we have idealized. Readers are invited to challenge racial hatred and injustice in their own context by looking to the lives of historical figures who have faced the challenges we currently face. By examining the self-care practices of personalities like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Benjamin Elijah Mays, and Martin Luther King Jr., this book examines the practices of introspection and self-work these historical figures engaged in that enabled them to fulfill the body of work they are celebrated for today.

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In Black Theology and The Black Panthers, Joshua S. Bartholomew deals with the relationship between economic justice and racial equality. By examining the economic philosophies and inter-communal survival programs of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense from 1967-1971, Bartholomew utilizes a Womanist methodology to connect the praxis of The Panthers with priorities of Black Theological Ethics. 

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Are You for Real? is a groundbreaking work that places imposter syndrome, the Bible, and society at the same table. In this project Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder addresses the shadow of facade and fake feeling that pervade not only women, but men and non-binary persons in various ways. Matters of racism, sexism, classism, and gender come to the forefront as the author engages imposter syndrome through the lens of biblical texts. 

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In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world.

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