Download or read book African Americans and the Bible written by Vincent L. Wimbush and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 913 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no other group of people has been as much formed by biblical texts and tropes as African Americans. From literature and the arts to popular culture and everyday life, the Bible courses through black society and culture like blood through veins. Despite the enormous recent interest in African American religion, relatively little attention has been paid to the diversity of ways in which African Americans have utilized the Bible.African Americans and the Bibleis the fruit of a four-year collaborative research project directed by Vincent L. Wimbush and funded by the Lilly Endowment. It brings together scholars and experts (sixty-eight in all) from a wide range of academic and artistic fields and disciplines--including ethnography, cultural history, and biblical studies as well as art, music, film, dance, drama, and literature. The focus is on the interaction between the people known as African Americans and that complex of visions, rhetorics, and ideologies known as the Bible. As such, the book is less about the meaning(s) of the Bible than about the Bible and meaning(s), less about the world(s) of the Bible than about how worlds and the Bible interact--in short, about how a text constructs a people and a people constructs a text. It is about a particular sociocultural formation but also about the dynamics that obtain in the interrelation between any group of people and sacred texts in general. ThusAfrican Americans and the Bibleprovides an exemplum of sociocultural formation and a critical lens through which the process of sociocultural formation can be viewed.
Download or read book The African American Guide to the Bible written by H.C. Felder and published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The African American Guide to the Bible makes the case for the relevance of the Bible from the perspective of people of color. It presents a comprehensive biblical view of topics of interest to African Americans and clarifies racial issues for white people. Part 1 addresses the inspiration of the Bible by giving evidence for its authenticity. A considerable amount of time is spent on examining the original text of the Bible, the archeological evidence, and the evidence from predictive prophecy to demonstrate the uniqueness of the Bible. Part 2 deals with the black presence in the Bible by demonstrating the prominence of people of color and black people in particular by highlighting their importance in the plan of God. It explains what it means to be black and demonstrates that the scientific and biblical evidence are both consistent with respect to race. Part 3 is a response to the arguments of racism used by critics of the Bible, for example, "Christianity is the white man's religion" and "Bible supports slavery and racism." These arguments are examined and evaluated in light of scripture and the context of history. Part 4 deals with the unity of humanity from a biblical perspective. It shows why racism is not only unbiblical but is evil when understood from the perspective of God.
Download or read book The Bible is Black History written by Theron D Williams and published by Bible Is Black History Institute, LLC. This book was released on 2022-08-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in an age when younger African-American Christians are asking tough questions that previous generations would dare not ask. This generation doesn't hesitate to question the validity of the Scriptures, the efficacy of the church, and even the historicity of Jesus. Young people are becoming increasingly curious about what role, if any, did people of African descent play in biblical history? Or, if the Bible is devoid of Black presence, and is merely a book by Europeans, about Europeans and for Europeans to the exclusion of other races and ethnicities? Dr. Theron D. Williams makes a significant contribution to this conversation by answering the difficult questions this generation fearlessly poses. Dr. Williams uses facts from the Bible, well-respected historians, scientists, and DNA evidence to prove that Black people comprised the biblical Israelite community. He also shares historical images from the ancient catacombs that vividly depict the true likeness of the biblical Israelites. This book does not change the biblical text, but it will change how you understand it.This Second Edition provides updated information and further elucidation of key concepts. Also, at the encouragement of readership, this edition expands some of the ideas and addresses concerns my readership felt pertinent to this topic.
Download or read book Oneness Embraced written by Tony Evans and published by . This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Bible as a guide and heaven as the goal, Oneness Embraced calls God's people to kingdom-focused unity. It tells us why we don't have it, what we need to get it, and what it will look like when we do. Mr. Evans weaves his own story into this word to the church.
Download or read book The Talking Book written by Allen Dwight Callahan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery’s secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of today’s hip-hop artists. The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout history. From a variety of perspectives this wide-ranging book is the first to explore the Bible’s role in the triumph of the black experience. Using the Bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom—literacy. Allen Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature. The author tells a moving story of a biblically informed African-American culture, identifying four major biblical images—Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel. He brings these themes to life in a unique African-American history that grows from the harsh experience of slavery into a rich culture that endures as one of the most important forces of twenty-first-century America.
Download or read book How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind written by Thomas C. Oden and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-07-23 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas C. Oden surveys the decisive role of African Christians and theologians in shaping the doctrines and practices of the church of the first five centuries, and makes an impassioned plea for the rediscovery of that heritage. Christians throughout the world will benefit from this reclaiming of an important heritage.
Download or read book Reading While Black written by Esau McCaulley and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition can help us connect with a rich faith history and address the urgent issues of our times. Demonstrating an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley shares a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation.
Download or read book Blackening of the Bible written by Michael Joseph Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-10-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Brown offers an overview of the history of the development of African American and Afrocentric biblical interpretation. He then discusses how such scholarship began as an attempt to correct the biases African Americans perceived to be manifest in European and Euro-American biblical scholarship. This corrective, he says, quickly developed a life of its own, and Afrocentric biblical interpretation developed its own interpretive voice and style. Brown also examines Afrocentrism and the "blackening of the Bible," offering a critique of the color politics of Afrocentric criticism. He examines the evolution of womanism as a method of biblical interpretation, and explores and criticizes the ways that ideological and postcolonial criticism has contributed to Afrocentric biblical criticism. Finally, he presents the challenges he thinks confront the practice of such criticism, and he advances a new paradigm for the project that will put it in conversation with a wider audience of biblical scholars, classicists, historians, and theologians. Michael Joseph Brown is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, Candler School of theology, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of What They Don't Tell You: A Survivor's Guide to Academic Biblical Studies and The Lord's Prayer through North African Eyes: A Window into Early Christianity.
Download or read book The African American Devotional Bible written by and published by Zondervan Publishing Company. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Red letter Daily insights from prominent black church leaders 250 weekday and 52 weekend meditations Book introductions Choice of 3 reading plans JSubject index Articles History of denominations Biographies on contributors 1,472 pp.
Download or read book Conjuring Culture written by Theophus H. Smith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a sophisticated new interdisciplinary interpretation of the formulation and evolution of African American religion and culture. Theophus Smith argues for the central importance of "conjure"--a magical means of transforming reality--in black spirituality and culture. Smith shows that the Bible, the sacred text of Western civilization, has in fact functioned as a magical formulary for African Americans. Going back to slave religion, and continuing in black folk practice and literature to the present day, the Bible has provided African Americans with ritual prescriptions for prophetically re-envisioning, and thereby transforming, their history and culture. In effect the Bible is a "conjure book" for prescribing cures and curses, and for invoking extraordinary and Divine powers to effect changes in the conditions of human existence--and to bring about justice and freedom. Biblical themes, symbols, and figures like Moses, the Exodus, the Promised Land, and the Suffering Servant, as deployed by African Americans, have crucially formed and reformed not only black culture, but American society as a whole. Smith examines not only the religious and political uses of conjure, but its influence on black aesthetics, in music, drama, folklore, and literature. The concept of conjure, he shows, is at the heart of an indigenous and still vital spirituality, with exciting implications for reformulating the next generation of black studies and black theology. Even more broadly, Smith proposes, "conjuring culture" can function as a new paradigm for understanding Western religious and cultural phenomena generally.
Download or read book Stony the Road We Trod written by Cain Hope Felder and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hallmark of American Black religion is its distinctive use of the Bible in creating community, resisting oppression, and fomenting social change. Stony the Road We Trod accomplishes this--and much more. This expanded edition contains a new introduction and three new essays that underscore the historic importance of this book for a new generation.
Download or read book African American Readings of Paul written by Lisa M. Bowens and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The letters of Paul—especially the verse in Ephesians directing slaves to obey their masters—played an enormous role in promoting slavery and justifying it as a Christian practice. Yet despite this reality African Americans throughout history still utilized Paul extensively in their own work to protest and resist oppression, responding to his theology and teachings in numerous—often starkly divergent and liberative—ways. In the first book of its kind, Lisa Bowens takes a historical, theological, and biblical approach to explore interpretations of Paul within African American communities over the past few centuries. She surveys a wealth of primary sources from the early 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, including sermons, conversion stories, slave petitions, and autobiographies of ex-slaves, many of which introduce readers to previously unknown names in the history of New Testament interpretation. Along with their hermeneutical value, these texts also provide fresh documentation of Black religious life through wide swaths of American history. African American Readings of Paul promises to change the landscape of Pauline studies and fill an important gap in the rising field of reception history.
Download or read book Beyond Roots written by William Dwight McKissic and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Transforming Scriptures written by Katherine Clay Bassard and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming Scriptures is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book Northrop Frye referred to as the “great code” of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard discusses how such texts respond as a collective “literary witness” to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination.
Download or read book The End of Days written by Matthew Harper and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For 4 million slaves, emancipation was a liberation and resurrection story of biblical proportion, both the clearest example of God's intervention in human history and a sign of the end of days. In this book, Matthew Harper demonstrates how black southerners' theology, in particular their understanding of the end times, influenced nearly every major economic and political decision they made in the aftermath of emancipation. From considering what demands to make in early Reconstruction to deciding whether or not to migrate west, African American Protestants consistently inserted themselves into biblical narratives as a way of seeing the importance of their own struggle in God's greater plan for humanity. Phrases like "jubilee," "Zion," "valley of dry bones," and the "New Jerusalem" in black-authored political documents invoked different stories from the Bible to argue for different political strategies. This study offers new ways of understanding the intersections between black political and religious thought of this era. Until now, scholarship on black religion has not highlighted how pervasive or contested these beliefs were. This narrative, however, tracks how these ideas governed particular political moments as African Americans sought to define and defend their freedom in the forty years following emancipation.
Download or read book The Negro Bible The Slave Bible written by and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Slave Bible was published in 1807. It was commissioned on behalf of the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves in England. The Bible was to be used by missionaries and slave owners to teach slaves about the Christian faith and to evangelize slaves. The Bible was used to teach some slaves to read, but the goal first and foremost was to tend to the spiritual needs of the slaves in the way the missionaries and slave owners saw fit.
Download or read book The Bible and African Americans written by Vincent L. Wimbush and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Americans' unique encounter with the Bible has shaped centuries of spirituality and the social engagement of a whole continent. In The Bible and African Americans, highly respected biblical scholar Vincent Wimbush outlines different ways African Americans read the Bible. The Bible offered a language-world--a place that held the stories where they could retreat and imagine themselves as something different than they were--through which African Americans have negotiated the strange land into which they were thrust. Wimbush outlines six African American readings that correspond to different historical periods. He details the various responses to these historical situations and how they helped shape a collective self-understanding. In this important and concise book, Wimbush demonstrates how the Bible empowered African Americans with agency and social power, still true today. When their voices were taken away, the Bible offered a way to speak again.
