Between the world of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity there appears to be the widest difference. Coates's brief comments on Christianity in his highly acclaimed Between the World and Me make clear that religious faith is alien to his own experience. Still, Christian audiences from congregations to theological schools engaged the text for its analysis of the state of race relations in the United States. In September 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted, "Best thing about #BetweenTheWorldAndMe is watching Christians engage the work. Serious learning experience for me." This volume takes that tweet as an invitation to theologians, ethicists, and religious studies scholars to engage the book, and as a challenge to do so in a way that is a learning experience for Coates, the authors, and readers.

Between the world of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity there appears to be the widest difference. Coates's brief comments on Christianity in his highly acclaimed Between the World and Me make clear that religious faith is alien to his own experience. Still, Christian audiences from congregations to theological schools engaged the text for its analysis of the state of race relations in the United States. In September 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted, ""Best thing about #BetweenTheWorldAndMe is watching Christians engage the work. Serious learning experience for me."" This volume takes that tweet as an invitation to theologians, ethicists, and religious studies scholars to engage the book, and as a challenge to do so in a way that is a learning experience for Coates, the authors, and readers. ""At its best, theology wrestles with the world we live in and what God calls us to be in the midst of this world. Coates' Between The World and Me was an unrelenting description of this world we inhabit. This collection of essays takes up the theological challenge to listen to Coates and speak with him to discern what faithfulness might look like in a world shaped by the violence of racism. It is a critical read."" --Brian Bantum, Associate Professor of Theology, Seattle Pacific University David Evans is Associate Professor of History and Intercultural Studies, and the Director of Cross Cultural Programs at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. Peter Dula is Professor of Religion and Culture, and Chair of the Department of Bible and Religion at Eastern Mennonite University.

Between the world of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity there appears to be the widest difference. Coates’s brief comments on Christianity in his highly acclaimed Between the World and Me make clear that religious faith is alien to his own experience. Still, Christian audiences from congregations to theological schools engaged the text for its analysis of the state of race relations in the United States. In September 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted, "Best thing about #BetweenTheWorldAndMe is watching Christians engage the work. Serious learning experience for me." This volume takes that tweet as an invitation to theologians, ethicists, and religious studies scholars to engage the book, and as a challenge to do so in a way that is a learning experience for Coates, the authors, and readers.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Short. Timely. Poignant. Pointed. Burying White Privilege is all of these and more. This is the book that everybody who cares about contemporary American Christianity will want to read. Many people wonder how white Christians could not only support Donald Trump for president but also rush to defend an accused child molester running for the US Senate. In a 2017 essay that went viral, Miguel A. De La Torre boldly proclaimed the death of Christianity at the hands of white evangelical nationalists. He continues sounding the death knell in this book. De La Torre argues that centuries of oppression and greed have effectively ruined evangelical Christianity in the United States. Believers and clerical leaders have killed it, choosing profits over prophets. The silence concerning—if not the doctrinal justification of—racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia has made white Christianity satanic. Prophetically calling Christian nationalists to repentance, De La Torre rescues the biblical Christ from the distorted Christ of white Christian imagination.

The theological attempts to understand Christ's body have either focused on "philosophical" claims about Jesus' identity or on "contextual" rebuttals--on a culturally transcendent, disembodied Jesus of the creeds or on a Jesus of color who rescues and saves a particular people because of embodied particularity. But neither of these two attempts has accounted for the world as it is, a world of mixed race, of hybridity, of cultural and racial intermixing. By not understanding the true theological problem, that we live in a mulatto world, the right question has not been posed: How can Christ save this mixed world? The answer, Brian Bantum shows, is in the mulattoness of Jesus' own body, which is simultaneously fully God and fully human. In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum reconciles the particular with the transcendent to account for the world as it is: mixed. He constructs a remarkable new Christological vision of Christ as tragic mulatto--one who confronts the contrived delusions of racial purity and the violence of self-assertion and emerges from a "hybridity" of flesh and spirit, human and divine, calling humanity to a mulattic rebirth. Bantum offers a theology that challenges people to imagine themselves inside their bodies, changed and something new, but also not without remnants of the old. His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.

An exceptional father-son story from the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us. Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence—and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack—and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free. Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father’s steadfast efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present—to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction. With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father’s generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond. Praise for The Beautiful Struggle “I grew up in a Maryland that lay years, miles and worlds away from the one whose summers and sorrows Ta-Nehisi Coates evokes in this memoir with such tenderness and science; and the greatest proof of the power of this work is the way that, reading it, I felt that time, distance and barriers of race and class meant nothing. That in telling his story he was telling my own story, for me.”—Michael Chabon, bestselling author of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the young James Joyce of the hip hop generation.”—Walter Mosley