Analyzing the extensive data gathered by the Public Influences of African American Churches project, which surveyed nearly two thousand churches across the country, Long March Ahead assesses the public policy activism of black churches since the civil rights movement. Social scientists and clergy consider the churches’ work on a range of policy matters over the past four decades: affirmative action, welfare reform, health care, women’s rights, education, and anti-apartheid activis...

New Day Begun presents the findings of the first major research project on black churches’ civic involvement since C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya’s landmark study The Black Church in the African American Experience. Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the scale and scope of African American churches’ civic involvement have changed significantly: the number of African American clergy serving in elective and appointive offi...

Contributions by William Ackah, Allan Boesak, Ebony Joy Fitchue, Leah Gaskin Fitchue, Walter Earl Fluker, Forrest E. Harris Sr., Nico Koopman, AnneMarie Mingo, Reggie Nel, Chabo Freddy Pilusa, Anthony G. Reddie, Boitumelo Senokoane, Rothney S. Tshaka, Luci Vaden, Vuyani Vellem, and Cobus van WyngaardAfter the 2008 election and 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as US president and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the first of several blacks to serve as South Africa's president, ...

Religion, Culture and Spirituality in Africa and the African Diaspora explores the ways in which religious ideas and beliefs continue to play a crucial role in the lives of people of African descent. The chapters in this volume use historical and contemporary examples to show how people of African descent develop and engage with spiritual rituals, organizations and practices to make sense of their lives, challenge injustices and creatively express their spiritual imaginings.

Christian ministries often struggle to account for urbanization's growing force, complexities, and reachâ€"and to formulate theologically and sociologically appropriate responses. Urban Ministry Reconsidered features a collection of original essays by leading scholars and practitioners that explores current issues and challenges in urban communities.Together these articles consider how cultural and structural frameworks have led to new conceptualizations and configurations of urban...

Essays on the civil rights movement outside the South and since the 1960s.It has become popular to confine discussion of the American civil rights movement to the mid-twentieth-century South. From Every Mountainside contains essays that refuse to bracket the quest for civil rights in this manner, treating the subject as an enduring topic yet to be worked out in American politics and society. Individual essays point to the multiple directions the quest for ...

This book on black churches and urban politics uses case studies from various cities to examine the strategies and tactics of activist clergy and congregations. These case studies illustrate how black activist clergy and congregations negotiate the political terrains of their respective cities. The cases show that the political culture of a city-whether that culture is shaped by machine politics, a legacy of political protest, racial and ethnic factionalism, or a city whose power resides i...

The author of Race for Profit carries out "[a] searching examination of the social, political and economic dimensions of the prevailing racial order" (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow).In this winner of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize for an Especially Notable Book, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor "not only exposes the canard of color-blindness but reveals how structural racism and class oppression are joined at the hip" (Robin D. G. Kelle...

America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin."It's time we right this unacceptable wrong," says bestselling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo. His participation in the civil rights movement bro...

A powerful polemic on the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society.America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in the ears of African Americans. But today the situation has grown even more dire. From the murders of black youth by the police, to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, to the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession, it is clear that black America faces an emergenc...

Forces are rapidly reshaping America's morals, social policies, and culture—but how do we stop it? Learn how to make your voice heard and reclaim America’s faith and values by reshaping our country’s current trajectory.Cultural elites in the media, academia, and politics are daily deceiving millions of Americans into passively supporting policies that are harmful to the nation and their own best interest. Although some Americans can see through the smokescreen, the...

A classic work on religion and the racial problems of modern america -now brought up to date.Since the early days of the Republic, Americans' exuberant, unchastened idealism, their commitment to the notion of a perfect society in the New World, has clashed with the reality of ugly American society, and religious groups have all too often accommodated themselves to these injustices.In Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma, C. Eric Lincoln reevaluates wha...