These days are filled with social unrest. Lack of compassion from elected officials, police brutality, unjust laws that create poverty through minimal wages but soaring profits for capitalists, benign neglect of blighted neighborhoods, and crime within the cities and in governments create a landscape of oppression that directly diminishes the quality of life, especially for African Americans. What is the role of the Black church and Black Christians in light of these realities? Just to save souls is not enough! Memoir of a Black Christian Nationalist: Seeds of Liberation is a poignant personal story of the author’s thirty-year experience of being a Black Christian Nationalist. The theological framework, program, and organization re-establishing the Black church’s relevancy to the liberation struggle are eloquently and informatively interwoven in . . . * The DNA Research about the Race of Jesus * The Powerful Leadership of Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr., Founder of the Shrines of the Black Madonna * The Transformation of Black People * The Seeds of Liberation—Answers for the Black Church * Practices That Create Freedom, Power, and a More Humane World

Using Savannah, Georgia, as a case study, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition tells the story of the rise and decline of Black Christian Nationalism. This nationalism emerged from the experiences of segregation, as an intersection between the sacred world of religion and church and the secular world of business. The premise of Black Christian Nationalism was a belief in a dual understanding of redemption, at the same time earthly and otherworldly, and the conviction that black Christians, once delivered from psychic, spiritual, and material want, would release all of America from the suffering that prevented it from achieving its noble ideals. The study's use of local sources in Savannah, especially behind-the-scenes church records, provides a rare glimpse into church life and ritual, depicting scenes never before described. Blending history, ethnography, and Geertzian dramaturgy, it traces the evolution of black southern society from a communitarian, nationalist system of hierarchy, patriarchy, and interclass fellowship to an individualistic one that accompanied the appearance of a new black civil society. Although not a study of the civil rights movement, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition advances a bold, revisionist interpretation of black religion at the eve of the movement. It shows that the institutional primacy of the churches had to give way to a more diversified secular sphere before an overtly politicized struggle for freedom could take place. The unambiguously political movement of the 1950s and 1960s that drew on black Christianity and radiated from many black churches was possible only when the churches came to exert less control over members' quotidian lives. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

"Malcolm X asked: Does Christianity have nothing more to offer than spiritual "novocaine," enabling Black Americans to suffer peacefully?"--

"What is the relationship," James Cone asks, "between my training as a theologian and the black struggle for freedom? For what reason has God allowed a poor black boy from Bearden to become a professional systematic theologian? As I struggled with these questions...I could not escape the overwhelming conviction that God's spirit was calling me to do what I could for the enhancement of justice in the world, especially on behalf of my people. 'My Soul Looks Back' chronicles the author's grappling with these questions, as well as his formulation of an answer--an answer that would lead to the development of a black theology of liberation. Firmly rooted in the black church tradition, James Cone relates the formative features of his faith journey, from his childhood experience in Bearden, Arkansas, and his father's steadfast resistance to racism, through racial discrimination in graduate school, to his controversial articulation of a faith that seeks to break the shackles of racial oppression. In describing his more recent encounters with feminist, Marxist, and Third World thinkers, James Cone provides a compelling description of liberation theology, and a vivid portrayal of what it means to profess "a faith that does justice". (Back cover).