Frederick L. Ware provides a classification and criticism of methodological perspectives in the academic study, interpretation, and construction of black theology in the U.S. from 1969 to the present, and establishes and recognizes three different schools of academic black theology: The Black Hermeneutical School The Black Philosophical School The Human Sciences School Similarities and differences are delineated in the identification of each school's representative thinkers and their views on the tasks, content, sources, norm, method, and goals of black theology.
Named an Honor Book for Nonfiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association African American theology has a long and important history. With modern roots in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, African American theology has gone beyond issues of justice and social transformation to participate in broader dialogues of theological inquiry. The Oxford Handbook of African American Theology brings together leading scholars in the field to offer a critical and comprehensive analysis of this theological tradition in its many forms and contexts. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this Oxford Handbook examines the nature, structures, and functions of African American Theology. The volume surveys the field by highlighting its sources, doctrines, internal debates, current challenges, and future prospects in order to present key topics related to the wider palette of Black Religion in a sustained scholarly format. This formative collection presents current scholarship on African American Theology and scripture, eschatology, Christology, womanist theology, sexuality, ontology, the global economy, and much more. The contributors represent a diverse set of faith perspectives, adding to the layered discourses within the volume. These essays further important discussions on the pressing debates and challenges that shape black and womanist theologies.
This book presents a substantial introduction to the major methodologies, figures, and themes within African American theology. Frederick L. Ware explores African American theology from its inception and places it within dual contexts: first, the African American struggle for dignity and full humanity; and second, the broader scope of Christian belief. Readers will appreciate Ware's demonstration of how black theology is expressed in a wide range of sources that includes not only scholarly publications but also African American sermons, music, news and editorials, biography, literature, popular periodicals, folklore, and philosophy. Each chapter concludes with questions for discussion and suggested resources for further study. Ware provides a seasoned perspective on where African American theology has been and where it is going, and he demonstrates its creativity within the chorus of Christian theology.
In this work Harry H. Singleton, III, uniquely combines the theological methods of Juan Luis Segundo and James H. Cone. Segundo's method of deideologization is appropriated to argue that relevant theological reflection must depart from the exposing of religio-political ideologies that justify human opression in the name of God and their need to be effectively countered by the creation of new theological presuppositions rooted in liberation. Singleton then contextualizes Segundo's method by offering Cone's theological perspective as the best example of such an approach in America insofar as it is able to discern the link between religio-political ideologies and black oppression.
In this, the first full-scale black systematic theology in twenty years, James Evans emerges as a major and distinctive voice in American theology.Seeking to overcome the chasm between church practice and theological reflection, Evans situates theology squarely in the nexus of faith with freedom. There, with a sure touch, he uplifts revelatory aspects of black religious experience that reanimate classical areas of theology, and he creates a theology with a heart, a soul and a voice that speaks directly to our condition.
Original and far-reaching, this book shows the resources for Black theology within the living tradition of African-American religion and culture. Beginning with the slave narratives, Hopkins tells how slaves received their masters' faith and transformed it into a gospel of liberation. Resources include the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Toni Morrison, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
This essential introduction to contemporary constructive theology charts the most important disciplinary trends of the moment. It gives a historical overview of the field and discusses key hermeneutical and methodological concerns. The contributors apply a constructive perspective to a wide range of approaches, ranging from biblical hermeneutics and postcolonial studies to comparative, political, and black theology. What is Constructive Theology? shows how diverse and interdisciplinary constructive theology can be by exploring key themes in the field. The contributors explore the porous boundaries between Christianity and other religions, reflect on contextual, liberation and constructive theologies from Africa and from Black British perspectives, explore the connection between embodiment, epistemology and hermeneutics, and take a constructive approach to the dangerous memories and theologies of colonial histories in Belgium and Native Americans in the United States. This sampler of the field will help you rethink theologies and find constructive alternatives.
Combining the theological methods of Juan Luis Segundo and James H. Cone, Harry Singleton sheds new light on the impact of race on the origin and development of theology in America. In Black Theology and Ideology Singleton appropriates Segundo's method of deideologization to argue that relevant theological reflection must expose religio-political ideologies that justify human oppression in the name of God as a distortion of the gospel and counter them with new theological presuppositions rooted in liberation. Singleton then contextualizes Segundo's method by offering the theology of James Cone as the most viable example of such a theological perspective in America. Chapters are The Black Experience and the Emergence of Ideological Suspicion," "The Western Intellectual Tradition and Ideological Suspicion," "Hermeneutical Methodology and the Emergence of Exegetical Suspicion," "A New Hermeneutic," and "The Case for Indigenous Deideologization." Harry H. Singleton, III, Ph.D., is assistant professor of comparative religions and African American religion in the religion/philosophy department at Benedict College, Columbia, South Carolina. "
Published originally as part of C. Eric Lincoln's series on the black religious experience, Is God a White Racist? is a landmark critique of the black church's treatment of evil and the nature of suffering. In this powerful examination of the early liberation methodology of James Cone, J. Deotis Roberts, and Joseph Washington, among others, Jones questions whether their foundation for black Christian theism—the belief in an omnibenevolent God who has dominion over human history—can provide an adequate theological foundation to effectively dismantle the economic, social, and political framework of oppression. Seeing divine benevolence as part of oppression's mechanism of disguise, Jones argues that black liberation theologians must adopt a new theism that is informed by humanism and its principle of the functional ultimacy of wo/man, where human choice and action determine whether our condition is slavery or freedom.
