* A womanist theology of change * Integrates postmodern thought, womanist theology, and process philosophy

Smart Ball follows Major League Baseball's history as a sport, a domestic monopoly, a neocolonial power, and an international business. MLB's challenge has been to market its popular mythology as the national pastime with pastoral, populist roots while addressing the management challenges of competing with other sports and diversions in a burgeoning global economy. Baseball researcher Robert F. Lewis II argues that MLB for years abused its legal insulation and monopoly status through arrogant treatment of its fans and players and static management of its business. As its privileged position eroded eroded in the face of increased competition from other sports and union resistance, it awakened to its perilous predicament and began aggressively courting athletes and fans at home and abroad. Using a detailed marketing analysis and applying the principles of a "smart power" model, the author assesses MLB's progression as a global business brand that continues to appeal to a consumer's sense of an idyllic past in the midst of a fast-paced, and often violent, present.

An African American folk saying declares, "Our God can make a way out of no way.... He can do anything but fail." When Dianne Swann-Wright set out to capture and relate the history of her ancestors--African Americans in central Virginia after the Civil War--she had to find that way, just as her people had done in creating a new life after emancipation. In order to tell their story, she could not rely solely on documents from the plantation where her forebears had lived. Unlike the register of babies born, marriages made, or lives lost that white families' Bibles contained, ledgers recorded Swann-Wright's ancestors, as commodities. Thus Swann-Wright took another route, setting out to gather spoken words--stories, anecdotes, and sayings. What results is a strikingly rich and textured history of a slave community. Looking at relations between plantation owners and their slaves and the succeeding generations of both, A Way out of No Way explores what it meant for the master-slave relation to change to one of employer and employee and how patronage, work relationships, and land acquisition evolved as the people of Piedmont Virginia entered the twentieth century. Swann-Wright illustrates how two white landowners, one of whom had headed a plantation before the Civil War, learned to compensate freed persons for their labor. All the more fascinating is her study of how the emancipated learned to be free--of how they found their way out of no way.

In her new book, Monica A. Coleman articulates the African American expression of "making a way out of no way" for today's context of globalization, religious pluralism, and sexual diversity. Drawing on womanist religious scholarship and process thought, Coleman describes the symbiotic relationship among God, the ancestors, and humanity that helps to change the world into the just society it ought to be. Making a Way Out of No Way shows us a way of living for justice with God and proposes a communal theology that presents a dynamic way forward for black churches, African traditional religions and grassroots organizations.

On the heels of his historic election to the United States Senate, Raphael G. Warnock shares his remarkable spiritual and personal journey. “Sparkling… a narrative of an extraordinary life, from impoverished beginnings in Savannah to his arrival on Capitol Hill. Along the way, he reflects with considerable candor and insight on the meaning and importance of faith, truth-telling and political and social redemption.”—The New York Times Book Review “A compelling, insightful memoir that details an extraordinary journey.” —Bryan Stevenson Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock occupies a singular place in American life. As senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and now as a senator from Georgia, he is the rare voice who can call out the uncomfortable truths that shape contemporary American life and, at a time of division, summon us all to a higher moral ground. Senator Warnock grew up in the Kayton Homes housing projects in Savannah, the eleventh of twelve children. His dad was a World War II veteran, and as a teenager his mom picked tobacco and cotton in rural Georgia. Both were Pentecostal preachers. After graduating from Morehouse College, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater, Senator Warnock studied for a decade at Union Theological Seminary while serving at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. At thirty-five, he became the senior pastor at Ebenezer, where Dr. King had preached and served. In January 2021, Senator Warnock won a runoff election that flipped control of the Senate at one of the most pivotal moments in recent American history. He is the first Black senator from Georgia, only the eleventh Black senator in American history, and just the second Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. As he said in his maiden speech from the well of the senate, Senator Warnock’s improbable journey reflects the ongoing toggle between the pain and promise of the American story. A powerful preacher and a leading voice for voting rights and democracy, Senator Warnock has a once-in-a-generation gift to inspire and lead us forward. A Way Out of No Way tells his remarkable story for the first time.

In barely forty years of life Martin Luther King (1929-1968) distinguished himself as one of the greatest social reformers of modern times: civil rights leader, defender of nonviolence in the struggle of desegregation, champion of the poor, anti-war proponent, and broad-minded visionary of an interrelated world of free people. His many verbal and written communications in the form of sermons, speeches, interviews, letters, essays, and several books are replete with Bible proverbs as «Love your enemies», «He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword», and «Man does not live by bread alone» as well as folk proverbs as «Time and tide wait for no man», «Last hired, first fired», «No gain without pain», and «Making a way out of no way». He also delighted in citing quotations that have become proverbs, to wit «No man is an island», «All men are created equal», and «No lie can live forever». King recycles these bits of traditional wisdom in various contexts, varying his proverbial messages as he addresses the multifaceted issues of civil rights. His rhetorical prowess is thus informed to a considerable degree by his effective use of his repertoire of proverbs which he frequently uses as leitmotifs or amasses into set pieces of fixed phrases to be employed repeatedly.

The Second Great Migration, the movement of African Americans between the South and the North that began in the early 1940s and tapered off in the late 1960s, transformed America. This migration of approximately five million people helped improve the financial prospects of black Americans, who, in the next generation, moved increasingly into the middle class. Over seven years, Lisa Krissoff Boehm gathered oral histories with women migrants and their children, two groups largely overlooked in the story of this event. She also utilized existing oral histories with migrants and southerners in leading archives. In extended excerpts from the oral histories, and in thoughtful scholarly analysis of the voices, this book offers a unique window into African American women's history. These rich oral histories reveal much that is surprising. Although the Jim Crow South presented persistent dangers, the women retained warm memories of southern childhoods. Notwithstanding the burgeoning war industry, most women found themselves left out of industrial work. The North offered its own institutionalized racism; the region was not the promised land. Additionally, these African American women juggled work and family long before such battles became a staple of mainstream discussion. In the face of challenges, the women who share their tales here crafted lives of great meaning from the limited options available, making a way out of no way.