BLACK SPIRITUALITY
Prelude: “Spirituality and Public Engagement”
1. Tutoring for James Cone in the 1970's
2. Linda E. Thomas, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Josiah Young
3. James Forbes, racism, and a deeper spirituality
4. Racism: America’s wound
5. Facing things: Athanasius, On the Incarnation, everything human, including the fear
of death, has been incorporated into the very being of God. Christian faith demands
facing what is the case.
6. Racism’s suffering is ubiquitous. The dishonesty and discomfort of white privilege
7. White complicity with political, social, and economic factors that perpetuate black
suffering
8. Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues. “Primitive” music.
9. Colonialism’s projected need for the primitive.
10. Psychoanalysis’ description of the need for the underdeveloped Other
11. The resistance to all this of black people
12. Black women in ECUSA: Kelly Brown Douglas, Nan Arrington Peete, Ann Holmes
Redding, the Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, Feb. 11, 1989, first woman ordained a bishop.
Our tradition also claims Sojourner Truth, Harriet Ross Tubman, Sarah Louise “Sadie”
Delany, Annie Elizabeth “Bessie” Delany, Verna Dozier, and Anna Pauline “Pauli”
Murray,.
Short Bibliography
Anderson, George M., “Theologians and White Supremacy: An Interview With James H.
Cone,” America, November 20, 2006, 10-15.
Battle, Michael Jesse, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: A Christian Spirituality of Nonviolence. (2004)
______, ed., Quest for Liberation and Reconciliation: Essays in Honor of J. Deotis
Roberts (2005)
______, Reconciliation: The Ubuntu Theology of Desmond Tutu (1997)
Brickman, Celia, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in
Psychoanalysis (2003)
Cone, James H., A Black Theology of Liberation
______, God of the Oppressed
______, The Spirituals and the Blues
Douglas, Ian T., and Kwok Pui-Lan, eds., Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican
Communion in the Twenty-First Century
Douglas, Kelly Brown, The Black Christ
______, Sexuality and the Black Church
Frederick, Marla F., Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith
(2003)
Grant, Jacqueline, White Woman’s Christ and Black Woman’s Jesus: Feminist
Christology and Womanist Response
Jones, James, “Response to Celia Brickman’s Aboriginal Populations in the Mind,”
Person, Culture, and Religion Group, American Academy of Religion, 2005.
Kujawa-Holbrook, Sheryl A., ed., Freedom Is a Dream: A Documentary History of
Women in the Episcopal Church (2002)
Pollard, Alton B., III, Mysticism and Social Change: The Social Witness of Howard
Thurman (1992)
Redding, Ann Holmes, Together, Not Equal: The Rhetoric of Unity and Headship in the
Letter to the Ephesians (Union Theological Seminary doctoral dissertation, 1999)
Sheldrake, Philip, “Christian Spirituality as a Way of Living Publicly,” Spiritus, Vol. 3
No. 1, 2003.
Thomas, Linda E., ed. Under the Canopy: Ritual Process and Spiritual Resilience in
South Africa
(2004)
West, Cornel, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity
Young, Josiah, No Difference in the Fare: Dietrich Bonhoeffer & the Problem of Racism