2012 Winner of the C. Calvin Smith Award presented by the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. 2014 Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award presented by the American Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion Section Conventional wisdom holds that Christians, as members of a “universal” religion, all believe more or less the same things when it comes to their faith. Yet black and white Christians differ in significant ways, from their frequency of praying or attending services to whether they regularly read the Bible or believe in Heaven or Hell. In this engaging and accessible sociological study of white and black Christian beliefs, Jason E. Shelton and Michael O. Emerson push beyond establishing that there are racial differences in belief and practice among members of American Protestantism to explore why those differences exist. Drawing on the most comprehensive and systematic empirical analysis of African American religious actions and beliefs to date, they delineate five building blocks of black Protestant faith which have emerged from the particular dynamics of American race relations. Shelton and Emerson find that America’s history of racial oppression has had a deep and fundamental effect on the religious beliefs and practices of blacks and whites across America.

"There is a way to pray so that you know God hears you and will answeryour prayer. There is a way to pray in faith -- all the time -- a way to get answers"--Amazon.com.

A full two years before the September 11, 2001 plane crashes pulverized New York's World Trade Center; before Osama Bin Laden's name became a household word, and before the country ever strained to sort out the issue of muslim aggresion, this book was on its way.

This handbook provides a thorough treatment of the various mechanisms African Americans have used to participate in U.S. political affairs from the colonial era to the present. With contributions by several of the field's experts, this concise, provocative volume explores the evolution and current status of African American political action. Focusing on distinct types of activity (protest politics, grassroots movements, electoral politics, political office holding), it charts the unique development of African Americans as they progressed from enslavement by whites to empowerment as citizens to an ever-growing influence on elections. As the book vividly demonstrates, African Americans' efforts to act on their own political behalf didn't begin in the 1960s. Even while enslaved, black people courageously launched petitions, instigated strikes on plantations, and staged full-blown revolts, creating a legacy of activism that expanded through the abolition movement, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, the post-World War II civil rights movement, and into the present.

One hundred sermons that display the victorious, although sometimes painful, historical and spiritual pilgrimage of black people in America. A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology—which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others—offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history. The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the rise and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the future of African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods. The preachers of these sermons are men and women from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, using metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. “Even during the most difficult and oppressive times,” Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, “the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege.” This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.

The prosperity movement has influenced millions of people in North America, Asia, Europe, South America, and Africa through Pentecostal, Charismatic and nondenominational preachers in some of the largest churches in the world. CNN, ABC, and Time magazine have examined the preachers and churches in this popular and controversial movement. Scholars and church leaders have studied it for more than two decades, producing dozens of books and articles on it. Considering the widespread popularity of the prosperity movement and the attention it is given by its critics, Brogdon asks, "Is prosperity preaching the new Pentecostal message?" In order to answer this question, one has to examine the prosperity movement as a Pentecostal movement instead of a Word of Faith movement that is a revised form of New Thought metaphysics and Science of Mind. Brogdon provides an introduction to the prosperity movement as a Pentecostal movement. He asks important questions in the study of the prosperity movement, such as who popularized prosperity teaching, Oral Roberts or Ken Hagin? Do all Pentecostals agree with the prosperity doctrine? Is prosperity teaching good news to the poor? Has prosperity replaced the emphasis on the Holy Spirit? The answers may surprise you.