These essays address issues of cultural criticism, utilization of Black religious sources, struggles of Afro-diasporan peoples, and ideological criticism in interpreting the biblical text, using new critical tools and challenging the discipline to broaden the canons of interpretation and sources. Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

"A faith in the God of the Bible and an association with the institutional church have had a positive influence on the African American community, and were key in the survival of the slave experience in America," says psychologist and professor Dr. Lee June. This book traces the history of Christianity among African Americans and the development of the "Black Church"-those denominations created by, created for, and stewarded by African Americans. He examines the role the church has played politically and psychologically as well as spiritually in the lives of African Americans. This comprehensive psychological and spiritual look at an historic institution will be a valuable tool for both pastors and seminary professors.

The Episcopal Church was the first in the American colonies to baptize blacks, to ordain black ministers, and to establish an African American congregation. Yet membership by blacks in the Episcopal Church has always been viewed as an anomaly. Yet With a Steady Beat argues that blacks have remained in the Episcopal Church because they have recognized it as a catholic and therefore inclusive institution.

“If reconciliation is the takeaway point for the civil rights story we usually tell, then the takeaway point for the more complex, more truthful civil rights story contained in Dear White Christians is reparations.” — from the preface to the second edition With the troubling and painful events of the last several years—from the killing of numerous unarmed Black men and women at the hands of police to the rallying of white supremacists in Charlottesville—it is clearer than ever that the reconciliation paradigm, long favored by white Christians, has failed to heal the deep racial wounds in the church and American society. In this provocative book, originally published in 2014, Jennifer Harvey argues for a radical shift away from the well-meaning but feeble longing for reconciliation toward a robustly biblical call for reparations. Now in its second edition—with a new preface addressing the explosive changes in American culture and politics since 2014, as well as an appendix that explores what a reparations paradigm can actually look like—Dear White Christians calls justice-committed Christians to do the gospel-inspired work of opposing racist social structures around them. Harvey’s message is historically and scripturally rooted, making it ideal for facilitating the difficult but important discussions about race that are so desperately needed in churches and faith-centered classrooms across the country.

Religion has always been crucial to the cultural identity of the South. Religion in the Contemporary South is the first book to fully address the emerging religious pluralism in the South today.

Michael Brown offers an overview of the history of the development of African American and Afrocentric biblical interpretation. He then discusses how such scholarship began as an attempt to correct the biases African Americans perceived to be manifest in European and Euro-American biblical scholarship. This corrective, he says, quickly developed a life of its own, and Afrocentric biblical interpretation developed its own interpretive voice and style. Brown also examines Afrocentrism and the "blackening of the Bible," offering a critique of the color politics of Afrocentric criticism. He examines the evolution of womanism as a method of biblical interpretation, and explores and criticizes the ways that ideological and postcolonial criticism has contributed to Afrocentric biblical criticism. Finally, he presents the challenges he thinks confront the practice of such criticism, and he advances a new paradigm for the project that will put it in conversation with a wider audience of biblical scholars, classicists, historians, and theologians. Michael Joseph Brown is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, Candler School of theology, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of What They Don't Tell You: A Survivor's Guide to Academic Biblical Studies and The Lord's Prayer through North African Eyes: A Window into Early Christianity.