Black Pioneers in a White Denomination
Title | Black Pioneers in a White Denomination PDF eBook |
Author | Mark D. Morrison-Reed |
Publisher | Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations |
Pages | 284 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | African American Unitarian Universalists |
ISBN | 9781558962507 |
Focusing largely on two pioneering black ministers -- Egbert Ethelred Brown, founder of the first Unitarian church in Harlem, and Lewis A. McGee, founder of the Interracial Free Religious Fellowship in Chicago's black ghetto -- Black Pioneers paints a painful yet important portrait of racism in liberal religion. Includes compelling stories from some of today's more integrated Unitarian Universalist congregations and biographical notes on past and present black Unitarian, Universalist and UU ministers.
Revisiting the Empowerment Controversy
Title | Revisiting the Empowerment Controversy PDF eBook |
Author | Mark D. Morrison-Reed |
Publisher | Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations |
Pages | 442 |
Release | 2018-06-06 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1558968199 |
Mark D. Morrison-Reed, the preeminent scholar of black Unitarian Universalist history, presents this long-awaited chronicle and analysis of the events of the Empowerment Controversy, which rocked Unitarian Universalism in the late sixties and continues to reverberate. It was a time of revolution, of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Like the country, the young Unitarian Universalist Association was forced to reckon with demands for change and found itself fractured by conflict about the implications of a commitment to racial justice. Morrison-Reed synthesizes decades of research and extensive interviews to present a nuanced and suspense-filled drama about Unitarian Universalism’s great crisis of faith. As he writes, “Perhaps wisdom can be gleaned from the pain and upheaval of those years, a wisdom that will be of use today in a new era.” Revisiting the Empowerment Controversy is the last book in a historical arc Morrison-Reed has traced since the publication of Black Pioneers in a White Denomination.
Race and the Making of the Mormon People
Title | Race and the Making of the Mormon People PDF eBook |
Author | Max Perry Mueller |
Publisher | UNC Press Books |
Pages | 348 |
Release | 2017-08-08 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1469633760 |
The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three "original" American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God's design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.
Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter
Title | Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter PDF eBook |
Author | Christopher Cameron |
Publisher | Vanderbilt University Press |
Pages | 356 |
Release | 2021-08-15 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0826502091 |
Black Lives Matter, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like “All night! All day! We’re gonna fight for Freddie Gray!” and “No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!” give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustain BLM. While BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected, contrary to general perceptions, religion neither has been absent nor excluded from the movement’s activities. This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion’s place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.
Standing Before Us
Title | Standing Before Us PDF eBook |
Author | Dorothy May Emerson |
Publisher | Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations |
Pages | 644 |
Release | 2000 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9781558963801 |
Letters, essays, stories, speeches and poems by women who were social reformers from 1776 to 1936.
A History of the Black Baptist Church
Title | A History of the Black Baptist Church PDF eBook |
Author | Wayne E Croft |
Publisher | |
Pages | 144 |
Release | 2020 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9780817018177 |
"The history of black people in the United States is a history of challenge and resilience, of suffering and solidarity, of injustice and prophetic resistance. It is a history steeped in the hope and strength that African Americans have derived from their faith in God and from the church that provided safety, community, consolation, and empowerment. In this new volume from pastor and scholar Rev. Dr. Wayne Croft, the history of the black Baptist church unfolds-from its theological roots in the Radical Reformation of Europe and North America, to the hush arbors and praise houses of slavery's invisible institution, to the evolution of distinctively black denominations. In a wonderfully readable narrative style, the author relates the development of diverse black Baptist associations and conventions, from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century's civil rights movement. Ideal for clergy and laity alike, the book highlights key leaders, theological concepts, historic events, and social concerns that influenced the growth of what we know today as the diverse black Baptist family of churches"--
Darkening the Doorways
Title | Darkening the Doorways PDF eBook |
Author | Mark D. Morrison-Reed |
Publisher | Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations |
Pages | 386 |
Release | 2011 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1558966102 |
Profiles, essays, and archival documents of African-American Unitarian Universalists.