African American spirituality was forged in the fiery furnace of slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial discrimination in both church and society. But African Americans are a people who are strengthened rather than weakened by their experience. This volume traces how African Americans have articulated their faith and love of God in language, song, and daily living. Beginning with its spiritual roots in Africa, Hayes shows how African American spirituality encompassed and incorporated the experience of slavery and the encounter with Christianity. Remarkably, African American slaves were able to find in the religion of their oppressors a message of hope, affirmation, and resistance. Through stories, song, distinctive forms of prayer, celebration, and prophetic witness, Hayes shows how the spirituality of African Americans has nurtured their survival as well as promoting action on behalf of the community and the greater society.

MLK and the Practice of Spirituality The scholarship on Martin Luther King Jr. is seriously lacking in terms of richly nuanced and revelatory treatments of his spirituality and spiritual life. This book addresses this neglect by focusing on King's life as a paradigm of a deep, vital, engaging, balanced, and contagious spirituality. It shows that the essence of the person King was lies in the quality of his own spiritual journey and how that translated into not only a personal devotional life of prayer, meditation, and fasting but also a public ministry that involved the uplift and empowerment of humanity. Much attention is devoted to King's spiritual leadership, to his sense of the civil rights movement as "a spiritual movement," and to his efforts to rescue humanity from what he termed a perpetual "death of the spirit." Readers encounter a figure who took seriously the personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical aspects of the Christian faith, thereby figuring prominently in recasting the very definition of spirituality in his time. King's "holistic spirituality" is presented here with a clarity and power fresh for our own generation.

A religious history from man's pre-mortal life to the end of the world.

‘’After a disquieting trip to Palestine in 2014, which was immediately followed by the Second Intifada in Israel, she was blown off her life’s course. In turmoil she read extensively looking for a refuge from the shock of her encounters. Rumi, Wendell Berry, Richard Rohr, Mary Oliver, Thomas Merton, the liberation theologians, and mystics lifted their lights for her. Better Than Right is one woman’s steps toward meaning. Definitely not a superhighway, her story is full of twists and turns, denoting her reflections and journey to make sense of life. She walks gingerly on a path that feels like a bewildered child caught in the crossfire of a bitter divorce. Her literary camera has both wide angle and close-up lenses to catch the sweeps and the detail of her journey on the third planet from the sun. Better Than Right invites you to see if her description resonates with your experience. Better still, does her light offer solace and hope for your next mile?