Download or read book The Unsung Role of Blacks in the Development of Christianity and Other World Rel written by Rufus O. Jimerson and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is twofold: (1) unravels the truth regarding who the biblical followers of God and Jesus resembled in respects to their heritage then and direct descendants today, (2) display supportive images and artifacts that demonstrate that there has been a hegemonic takeover of Christianity from people they have conquered and scorned. Biblical citations are used with images and artifacts in Europe and other parts of the white known world At this point in the history of the world, xenophobia and racial scorn against blacks was non-existent. The achievements and skills of black or burnt skinned people were admired. Collectively, these Ethiopians or Egyptians's reputation was legendary. In the Roman Empire, the Israelites of Northeast Africa (called the Middle East today) were physically considered indistinguishable from Ethiopians and Egyptians. The wide discrepancy between how early Christians, particularly in Europe, portrayed biblical figures and citations in the Bible and ethnocentric portrayal today is investigated. In the United States of America (USA) the race of biblical figures and authors has been purged and replaced by Nordic or Northern European people who hold hegemony over the Western World and its former colonies. Besides the modern xenophobia and racial scorn held by the hegemonic Westerners purging the messengers of the Gospel, they have used the message to subjugate the descendants of the original Israelites who were enslaved in America, segregated, dehumanized devaluated, demonized, profiled, miseducated, excessively incarcerated, and underdeveloped. This book explains the rationale for this racism and why revealing the truth can save the scorned and change Western attitudes to an era whereby “content of ones character” and “service to others” purges hegemonic-led racism and privilege at the expense of humanity. If race and color was not important in regards to Christianity, according to those holding hegemonies and their surrogates, why have them purged Black Israelites, Egyptians and other people of the Bible from its annuals and displace them with their own descendants who were primarily living on the barbaric fringes of the Roman Empire in Europe. Ancient Israel and what we call the Middle East today was considered the Northeastern part of the African continent quite distant from the ancestral homelands of those holding hegemonies in the West. This book explains how the Indo-Europeans, including Arabs, conquered Northeast Africa claiming the land, civilization and religion as their own. The transformation was com-pleted within the last 300 or 400 years. Christianity a religion designed to save all humanity became a religion that subjugates people of color and elevates those holding power to “divine-like” status on the basis of their socioeconomic status.
Download or read book Righteous Riches written by Milmon F. Harrison and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-03 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God want us to be wealthy? Many people believe that God offers not only eternal joy in the hereafter but also material blessings in the here and now. Other Christians see this "prosperity theology," as nothing more than vulgar materialism, incompatible with orthodox Christianity. In Righteous Riches, Milmon F. Harrison examines the Word of Faith movement, an independent, non-denominational Christian movement that preaches the so-called "health and wealth gospel." The Word of Faith movement is an international network loosely bound by a basic doctrine called the "Faith Message," which teaches that it is God's will for Christians to be prosperous, successful, and healthy in the present life. Drawing on his personal experiences as a former insider and in-depth interviews with members, Harrison takes us inside the movement, revealing what it is like to belong, and how people accept, reject, and reshape Word of Faith doctrines to fit their own lives. Although the movement is not exclusively African American, many of its most prominent and recognized leaders are African American ministers with large congregations and national television audiences. Analyzing the movement's appeal to African Americans, Harrison argues that, because of their history of oppression and discrimination, African American religious institutions have always had to address the material--as well as spiritual--concerns of their members. The Word of Faith Movement, he says, is one of several prosperity movements that resonate strongly with African Americans. Situating the movement in the contexts of both contemporary American religion and the history of the Black Church, Righteous Riches offers a fascinating look at a quintessentially American phenomenon.
Download or read book Blacks and Religion Volume Two written by Robin Walker and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-12-09 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion can be a major source of conflict and controversy between individuals, peoples, nations and races. However, what all the major religions agree upon is their unified efforts to downplay, disregard, and remove the role of Black people from their respective histories. This book, Blacks and Religion Volume Two, challenges this. The book shows that Black people are a part of the respectful history of these religions and therefore have as much to do with these religions as anyone else. Part One of this book is called Black Influences in the Origin of Judaism. It discusses the origins of the Jews, the origins of certain Jewish religious ideas, and what roles Black people played in influencing those ideas. Part Two is called Black Influences in the Origin of Christianity. It contains a history of the early African church, the origins of certain Christian religious ideas, and what roles Black people played in influencing those ideas. The book traces the Christ story, the historical Jesus, the Black Madonna and Child, and Nile Valley influences on these concepts. Part Three is called Black Influences in the Origin of Islam and the Indian Religions. It discusses the origins of Islam, and the roles Black people played in its inception. There is also a discussion on the origins of Shaivism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Part Four brings the discussion nearer to our modern times and is called Black Influences in the Origin of the New Religious Movements. It discusses the origins of Rastafari, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam, and Black Liberation Theology.
Download or read book African American Religion written by David Musa and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-07-06 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature on North American slavery is almost inexhaustible but negligent of the religious culture of the slaves, most especially African-American Christianity. As noted in Robert Handys insightful article, for several decades AfricanAmerican Christianity appeared only as incidentals in the general historiography of American Church history. Considering the immeasurably positive role of the Church in the lives of African-Americans, this oversight is almost inexcusable. Even where studies in slave Christianity have been attempted one would search in vain for any substantial discussion of the mutual effects of the slaves original African religion and Christianity. Thus this study is a contribution to recent explorations into that vital aspect of the history of African slaves in North America their Christianization. The study focuses on the question of why the African slaves were apparently more responsive to Christianity in the Great Awakenings than during the previous evangelization efforts by the Anglican missionaries. I propose that the continuities as well as discontinuities between Christianity and African Traditional Religion were key among determinant factors in the slaves response to Christianity. Basically, the slaves responded to the type of Christianity in which these factors were more prominent, the Great Awakenings vis--vis the Anglican version. The first chapter of this study highlights the problem of past inattention to slave Christianity, especially as it relates to African Traditional Religion. In Chapter two, I argue for both West Africa as the original home of the slaves and African Traditional Religion as the predominant religious culture of that region. The third chapter describes the process, personnel, and problems encountered in slave Christianization. Chapters four and five analyze and evaluate the impact of Christianizing efforts by the Anglican missionaries and revival evangelists respectively. Chapter six summarizes and discusses the value of my findings for the African-American Church and Christianity in general. The study contains suggestions for further research.
Download or read book The Burden of Black Religion written by Curtis J. Evans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book African American Christianity written by Paul E. Johnson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-07-06 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight leading scholars have joined forces to give us the most comprehensive book to date on the history of African-American religion from the slavery period to the present. Beginning with Albert Raboteau's essay on the importance of the story of Exodus among African-American Christians and concluding with Clayborne Carson's work on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s religious development, this volume illuminates the fusion of African and Christian traditions that has so uniquely contributed to American religious development. Several common themes emerge: the critical importance of African roots, the traumatic discontinuities of slavery, the struggle for freedom within slavery and the subsequent experience of discrimination, and the remarkable creativity of African-American religious faith and practice. Together, these essays enrich our understanding of both African-American life and its part in the history of religion in America.
Download or read book Down Up and Over written by Dwight N. Hopkins and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First reconstructs the culutral matrix of African American religion, a total way of life formed by Protestantism, American culture, and the institution of slavery (1619-1865). Whites from Europe and Blacks from Africa arrived with specific, differing views of God, faith, and humanity. Hopkins recreates their worldviews and shows how white theology sought to remake African Americans into naturally inferior beings divinely ordained into subservience. The counter voice of enslaved blacks is the birth of the Spirit of liberation." -- Back cover.
Download or read book Black Religion and Black Radicalism written by Gayraud S. Wilmore and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its first publication 25 years ago Black Religion and Black Radicalism has established itself as the classic treatment of African American religious history. Wilmore shows to what extent the history of African Americans can be told in terms of religion, and to what extent this religious history has been inseparably bound to the struggle for freedom and justice. From the story of the slave rebellions and emancipation, to the rise of Black nationalism and the freedom struggles of recent times, up through the development of Black, womanist, and Afrocentric theologies, Wilmore offers an essential interpretation of African American religious history.
Download or read book Christianity Is an African Religion written by Donald Henry Matthews, Ph.d. and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book affirms that Christianity was based on Black Egyptian African Spirituality. This fact has been obscured, hidden and ignored by the impact of White Christian Religious Racism. Prior to the development of modern racism, with the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Rapetalistic Ideology of Racial, Sexual and Economic Oppression, it was widely accepted that African Spirituality was the basis for the major theological and ethical perspectives found in the Western religions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Due to Institutional Racism these facts have been withheld or misrepresented by our educational institutions. This miseducation serves to support racist ideas of Black Inferiority and White Supremacy that are used to oppress Americans of African descent. Black Egyptian Africans were the original recipients and developers of the revelations of theological and ethical concepts that defined the Western Religious Traditions. Concepts such as: Monotheism, Moral Codes, Eternal Life, Resurrection, A Dying and Rising Savior, Power of the Divine Feminine, and Scripture are just a few of the fundamental truths that these ancient Black African priests and scribes gave to the world which were then used to develop Western Religions. The book is based on an article written by Dr. Donald H. Matthews in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), the official professional journal of the American Academy of Religion. This book It is written in a style that makes it accessible to the general public. The afore mentioned article is reprinted for the benefit of the scholarly community and for those who wish to delve further into the subject.
Download or read book The Color of Compromise written by Jemar Tisby and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby takes readers back to the roots of sustained racism and injustice in the American church. Filled with powerful stories and examples of American Christianity's racial past, Tisby's historical narrative highlights the obvious ways people of faith have actively worked against racial justice, as well as the complicit silence of racial moderates. Identifying the cultural and institutional tables that must be flipped to bring about progress, Tisby provides an in-depth diagnosis for a racially divided American church and suggests ways to foster a more equitable and inclusive environment among God's people. Book jacket.
Download or read book Memorializing the Unsung written by Elochukwu Uzukwu, C.S.Sp. and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-06-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this “ancient” Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large—a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism. Without the support and creativity of these unsung lay Catholics across west-central and eastern Africa, Uzukwu shows, the European missions in the region would have failed. Even while enslaved, the Kongo Slaves of the Church and the eastern African Slaves of the Mission served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world.
Download or read book The Color of Christ written by Edward J. Blum and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the dynamic nature of Christ worship in the U.S., addressing how his image has been visually remade to champion the causes of white supremacists and civil rights leaders alike, and why the idea of a white Christ has endured.
Download or read book The Tragic Vision of African American Religion written by M. Johnson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many have used the term 'tragic' to refer to African American religious and cultural experience. After a studied meditation on and articulation of the 'tragic vision,' Johnson argues that African American Christian Consciousness is an expression of the tragic and a tragic expression of the Christian Faith.
Download or read book African Catholic written by Elizabeth A. Foster and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Foster examines how French imperialists and the Africans they ruled imagined the religious future of sub-Saharan Africa in the years just before and after decolonization. The story encompasses the transition to independence, Catholic contributions to black intellectual currents, and efforts to create an authentically "African" church.
Download or read book Afro Catholic Festivals in the Americas written by Cécile Fromont and published by . This book was released on 2021-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how, in the Americas, people of African birth or descent found spiritual and social empowerment in the orbit of the Church. Draws connections between Afro-Catholic festivals and their precedents in the early modern Christian kingdom of Kongo.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of African Theology written by Elias Kifon Bongmba and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theology has a rich tradition across the African continent, and has taken myriad directions since Christianity first arrived on its shores. This handbook charts both historical developments and contemporary issues in the formation and application of theologies across the member countries of the African Union. Written by a panel of expert international contributors, chapters firstly cover the various methodologies needed to carry out such a survey. Various theological movements and themes are then discussed, as well as biblical and doctrinal issues pertinent to African theology. Subjects addressed include: • Orality and theology • Indigenous religions and theology • Patristics • Pentecostalism • Liberation theology • Black theology • Social justice • Sexuality and theology • Environmental theology • Christology • Eschatology • The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament The Routledge Handbook of African Theology is an authoritative and comprehensive survey of the theological landscape of Africa. As such, it will be a hugely useful volume to any scholar interested in African religious dynamics, as well as academics of Theology or Biblical Studies in an African context.
Download or read book Black Tudors written by Miranda Kaufmann and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2018 A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England… They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.
