Since its start in 1966, black liberation theology in the United States has continually engaged international developments with Africa and the entire world. But after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990, there has been an almost twenty-year break in books on black theology and international affairs. Black Theology--Essays on Global Perspectives bridges that post-1990 gap and makes a vital contact with Africa again. This book conceptualizes black theology to take on the global reconfigurations and opportunities brought about by the rapidly shrinking earth of fast-paced, worldwide contacts. In other words, in the specificity of the genealogy of black theology, we need to reforge ties with Africa. This claim is based on tradition. And in the generality of the larger worldwide intertwining of technologies and economics, we need a new type of black theological leadership for the twenty-first century. This claim is based on today's international challenges. The essays in this book draw on tradition and point forward in the midst of today's worldwide challenges and favorable possibilities, given the closeness of all nations and the varieties of cultures.

What do African American men have to do with gender? In this collection of riveting and wide-ranging essays, Dwight N. Hopkins draws on over thirty-five years of wrestling with these questions. Too often gender is seen as a "woman's only" discussion. But in reality, men have a gender too. Some say it is biological; others claim it has to do with socialization. Hopkins's career has focused on defining what a black American man is, and how he builds bridges of support and engagement with women. Hopkins's research as a theologian, and his experiences, substantiate that the importance of religious viewpoints, principled values, and future hope remain key to any successful creation of a new African American male and new healthy male-female interactions.

Shoki Coe was among the first to speak of "contextualization" in theology. Coe argued that theology is not a reiteration of past formulas or doctrines but a response to the self-disclosing initiative of the living God in history and human experience. Yet he remains little known outside his native Taiwan. Wresting with God in Context introduces Coe's work and social vision and evaluates his contributions to the field of missiology and ecclesiology. Eager to offer a creative and critical witness to Christian faith, Coe worked tirelessly to liberate theology from its Western captivity and shaped a generation of theological reflection on God, culture, and history. For thousands of students and church members around the world, Shoki Coe was the spiritual father that guided their contextual theological pursuit to the living reality of God. In order to reflect on his legacy, the chapters in this volume--including original essays from Stephen Bevans, Dwight Hopkins, and Enrique Dussel--tackle the critical, methodological issues related to doing theology, reading the Scriptures, and being the church.

In Vulnerability and Resilience, vulnerability is not the final word. Rather, resilience provides the cutting edge and living breath in the stories of subjects who are vulnerable. And they have many stories: stories of being trapped in bodies, teachings, and/or situations that make them (and others like them) vulnerable to discrimination, hatred, and rejection; stories of being trapped because of their bodies, theologies, and/or cultures; and stories of being trapped for no-good reason. For subjects who are vulnerable, life is like a maze of traps, and stories of resilience keep them going. The contributors to Vulnerability and Resilience refuse to be trapped. At the intersection of body and liberation theologies, they tell their stories in the hope that they will expose cultures that make individuals and communities vulnerable, and that those stories will encourage vulnerable subjects to be resilient and bring change to theological institutions that conserve vulnerability. Because of the location of the contributors—the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, Caribbean, and Oceania—this book is a testimony that vulnerability is present all over the world, and that resilience is a liberating alternative.

Responses to the recent pandemic have been driven by fear, with social distancing and locking down of communities and borders as the most effective tactics. Out of fear and strategies that separate and isolate, emerges what has been described as the “new normal” (which seems to mutate daily). Truly global in scope, with contributors from across the world, this collection revisits four old responses to crises – assure, protest, trick, amend – to explore if/how those might still be relevant and effective and/or how they might be mutated during and after a global pandemic. Together they paint a grounded, earthy, context-focused picture of what it means to do theology in the new normal.

A Washington Post most anticipated fall book | One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024 A lyrical meditation on how Black Americans have envisioned utopia—and sought to transform their lives. How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson’s exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the conditions of their lives. Writing in the tradition of Saidiya Hartman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robertson makes his way from his ancestral hometown of Promise Land, Tennessee, to Detroit—the city where he was born, and where one of the country’s most remarkable Black utopian experiments got its start. Founded by the brilliant preacher Albert Cleage Jr., the Shrine of the Black Madonna combined Afrocentric Christian practice with radical social projects to transform the self-conception of its members. Central to this endeavor was the Shrine’s chancel mural of a Black Virgin and child, the icon of a nationwide liberation movement that would come to be known as Black Christian Nationalism. The Shrine’s members opened bookstores and co-ops, created a self-defense force, and raised their children communally, eventually working to establish the country’s largest Black-owned farm, where attempts to create an earthly paradise for Black people continues today. Alongside the Shrine’s story, Robertson reflects on a diverse array of Black utopian visions, from the Reconstruction era through the countercultural fervor of the 1960s and 1970s and into the present day. By doing so, Robertson showcases the enduring quest of collectives and individuals for a world beyond the constraints of systemic racism. The Black Utopians offers a nuanced portrait of the struggle for spaces—both ideological and physical—where Black dignity, protection, and nourishment are paramount. This book is the story of a movement and of a world still in the making—one that points the way toward radical alternatives for the future.