BLACK THEOLOGY最新文献

{"title":"Mermaids and Journeymen: Revival Zion and Africana Religious Futures","authors":"Khytie K. Brown","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1990498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1990498","url":null,"abstract":"Legend says that River Mumma inhabits the rivers of Jamaica, and all the fish are River Mumma’s children. Sometimes, people say, River Mumma rises out of the river to sit on the rocks and comb her long, black hair. But, like they say, don’t touch River Mumma. Don’t even look at her. There’s no telling what she will do if you try. Some say if you so much as see her, you’ll fall into a trance and she’ll grab you by the heels and drag you under the river. If you try to catch her, the fish will disappear; the river will run dry. It’s best, they say, not to make trouble with River Mumma. – Amy Friedman 1","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"229 - 239"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48822746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond a “Political Priest”: Exploring Desmond Tutu as a “Freedom-Fighter Mystic”","authors":"Sarojini Nadar","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1997167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1997167","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The purpose of this essay is to critically review the remarkably unique account of Desmond Tutu’s life presented by Michael Battle in his book “Desmond Tutu: A Spiritual Biography of South Africa’s Confessor.” The central contention of this essay is that Michael Battle shifts the paradigm of biographical research about Desmond Tutu beyond the popular trope of “political priest” to that of “freedom fighter-mystic.” Through a careful filtering of Tutu’s life via the three stages of mysticism – purgation, illumination and union, Battle makes a convincing case that Tutu’s political actions for justice were not in spite of his deep spirituality, but because of it. This ethnographic spiritual biography troubles the binaries between the sacred and the secular, between spiritual contemplation and social action, and between God’s justice and social justice, thereby inviting readers to the warm embrace of a more authentic spirituality.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"268 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43212529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction","authors":"Terrance Dean","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1990493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1990493","url":null,"abstract":"Critical conversations have emerged within the concepts of Afropessimism and Afrofuturism, particularly, the future and/or non-future of Blackness and Black people in the twenty-first century. Moreover, where does Blackness and Black people situate themselves within these framed concepts as it relates to Black Religious faith tradition and Black Religious Thought? How and where does religion and theology take up these matters in relation to Blackness and Black people within their faith traditions and experiences? Scholars, mainly within Black Studies, have taken up these ideologies in an effort to locate Blackness and Black people in a white racist patriarchal system that anchors itself within white right, and white nihilism. Yet, where does the Black faith tradition situate itself in religious discourses centered in white theology, and how can it permeate the discourse on redemption and hope, or failure and the unsalvageable? It is why this special issue journal, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism and Black Religious Thought: Conceptualizing Ideologies of Race, Religion, Gender and Sexuality in the 21st Century, takes up these matters, whereas Black religion scholars consider these concepts within the study of religion and theology. One key question for consideration, where does the recovery work begin, and where does it end in relation to Black person’s race, gender and sexuality, and religious ideologies in Black Religious Thought?” Key voices within Afropessimissm scholarship, Saidiya Hartman, Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson have made a critical juncture toward naming Blackness and Black people’s lives and experiences a unique distinction within Black suffering. Essentially, Black persons experiences within the concept of liberation or liberatory means is bound to the historied notion of slavery, which has become systemic and structural against Black life progress and liberation. Afropessimism, according to Frank Wilderson, makes the following claims, and it is worth quoting in length,","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"191 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49071903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Queer Homiletic Futurity: The Radical Sexuality of James Baldwin","authors":"Terrance Dean","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1990494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1990494","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Examining the afterlife of slavery, mainly interrogating the futurity of black sexuality and contemptuous Black queer bodies as possible identities of radical futurism in a queer homiletic. I position this essay within the framework of a futuristic queer homiletic, such that, Black queer identity reimagines itself within the plane of Afrofuturism disrupting the continuum of heterosexuality, and Black respectability. The futurity of Black queerness re-turns itself into a living bound subject. I make use of James Baldwin and his gender sexual politics as a Black gay man. Drawing upon his semi-autobiographical essay, “Here Be Dragons,” Baldwin illustrates how he was eliminated from his family, primarily by his step-father, who was disgusted by Baldwin's ugliness and dark skin, and moreover, his effeminate and queer mannerisms. Baldwin, feeling “dumped” by his family, was also displaced, or, “removed” from his black community of Harlem because of his sexuality. He seeks refuge in Greenwich Village, a white community which houses many gay clubs and bars. It is here that Baldwin faces a similar reality of being isolated, neglected, and eliminated for not only his queer identity, but his Black skin and Black identity. Baldwin, in public view, renders as a site of failure in that he is unacknowledged because of his Black queer identity and is rendered, or read as disgust, an 'other.' Thus, he is bounded “out” of society, “out” of sight, and ultimately left searching for a place, a home to call his own. Baldwin reimagines himself, a living subject, bound for life. As such, a futuristic queer homiletic enables Black queerness to the center of Black sexuality and Black identity.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"249 - 267"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47462558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Incarnational Power: The Queering of the Flesh and Redemption in Lovecraft Country","authors":"Courtney Bryant","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1990497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1990497","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay interrogates the Christian concept of incarnation as a salvific device through an womanist/feminist, ethical analysis of the gender/sexuality/race bending storyline and romance of Ruby Baptiste and Christine Braithwaite, in HBO’s cinematic speculative fiction Lovecraft Country. Pressing at the meanings of salvation and ontology, it considers how Lovecraft Country’s queering of incarnational power, gender/sexuality and race critiques, complicates and reimagines the religious, socio-material and erotic significance of “the flesh” and its implications on redemption.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"207 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43679128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond Analogues and Analytics: Afrofuturism and the Recovery of Frank Wilderson’s Grammar of Black Suffering","authors":"Christophe D. Ringer","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1990496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1990496","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article argues that Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism as a analytic contains philosophical contradictions that can be resolved through currents in Afrofuturism. The article argues Wilderson's use of Orlando Patterson's concept of social death results in a performative contradiction as its claims deny the very possibility of their justification. The result is the inability to substantiate that Blackness as coterminous with Slaveness. The article then argues that Wilderson's Afropessimism is better understood as a mythology rather than an analytic. Interpreted as myth, Afropessimism can articulate the grammar of Black suffering through a religious consciousness rather than scientistic or philosophical reason. Afrofuturism serves as a resource in this task by creating images of the past and present simultaneously within consciousness. The claim is evidenced through engaging Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Octavia Butler's Kindred.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"240 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43304382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afterlives of Slavery: Afrofuturism and Afropessimism as Parallax Views","authors":"W. Hart","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1990495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1990495","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT If stars appear to change position, to be displaced when viewed from different point in the earth's orbit, then by analogy we might say that Afrofuturism and Afropessimism are parallax angles on the afterlife of slavery. Afrofuturism and Afropessimism inhabit forms of imaginative spacetime that are both congruent and incongruent. I will call the triangular relations among the afterlife of slavery, Afrofuturism, and Afropessimism, a “black mood.” While this mood certainly has psychological meaning for individuals, I primarily point toward a sociological phenomenon that shapes the collective mood long term. This black mood is an intellectual disposition with emotional resonance. It produces both empowering joyful affects and disempowering sad affects. Though it is hardly the only black mood, this one is influential in sectors of the Blackamerican intelligentsia both within and beyond the academy. In this article, I explore a few points of contact among Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and black religion.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"196 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47610757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Untangling the Legacies of Slavery: Deconstructing Mission Christianity for our Contemporary Kerygma","authors":"Anthony G. Reddie","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1949143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1949143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper arises from a pilot project of the Council for World Mission (CWM) that is seeking to explore the Legacies of Slavery via the archives of the London Missionary Society, the forerunners of CWM. Arguments around the justification of European Christian Mission often focus on the efficacy and utilitarianism of missionary activity, in terms of education, medicine or the removal unethical indigenous religio-cultural practices. This paper seeks to move beyond these justifications to focus on the representational damage imposed on the descendants of enslaved Africans that have traduced Black bodies to “less than” in the body politic of many Western nations in the global North. The denigration of Black bodies has continued beyond the epoch of slavery and finds expression in the absurdity of Black people needing to assert that “Black Lives Matter”.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"152 - 167"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14769948.2021.1949143","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49577062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reimagining Hagar: blackness and Bible","authors":"Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan’a Mphahlele)","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1954372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1954372","url":null,"abstract":"prayers. One example is “Benediction for Stepping out into the Empire” [57] with the deploying of “the light, the salt, the hand, the water”. How about being light that liberates, salt that savours, hands that carry, water that washes. Grammar, empire’s tool, is not neutral. In this regard I would have loved to see more prayers in local “tongues in order to ‘mash-up’ empire’s White English grammar”! A “betraying of tradition” has to be pushed to greater lengths. For instance, the able-bodiedness of some of the imagery is striking whether eyes, hands, head, hearts, feet, etc. Then there is an internalising deployment of “light” over darkness [light-bearers, 63] which is troubling. There are some excellent materials around baptism and eucharist, though we seem to be stuck to the inherited sequences of the rituals. I wonder what a full “break-out” from the liturgical empire would look like.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"185 - 187"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44581188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Anthony G. Reddie","doi":"10.1080/14769948.2021.1954369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14769948.2021.1954369","url":null,"abstract":"A central aspect of Black theology has always been the necessity to rethink historically accepted norms, particuarly in terms of socio-cultural and political phenomena, within the realms of theological and religious traditions. It can be argued that the most central aspect of this facet of rethinking can be seen in the attempt by Black theology to rehabilitate the Black body against centuries of deleterious thinking. Alongside this central necessity, Black theology has sought to rethink all aspects of White, Euro-American hegemony. This issue of Black Theology: An International Journal contains five articles, all of which, draw into our purview substantive attempts to rethink historic phenomena, religious traditions and epistemological norms. Carol Troupe’s article opens this particular issue of our journal. Her work, emerges from a Council for World Mission’s (CWM) funded pilot project that is a part of their prophetic and epoch making “Legacies of Slavery” programme. As part of the Council for World Mission’s Legacies of Slavery project, the author, from her perspective as a descendant of enslaved Africans, explores the themes that emerged during her initial encounter with historical missionary magazine material. This research involved several visits to the London Missionary Society archives held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, in the University of London), in order to interrogate aspects of the historical literature held in their “Special Collections”. Drawing on insights from Black and Womanist theologies, she asks questions about what reflection on these themes can offer to contemporary practice and church mission. Willy L. Mafuta and Chammah J. Kaunda’s jointly written article draws on the insights of the famed British philosopher of religion, John Hick. Drawing from John Hick’s soteriological criterion of religious pluralism, this essay questions the way in which Christianity is often portrayed as the normative standard by which other so called “Primitive” religions are assessed, in terms of their veracity to be seen as legitimate forms of expression of the human quest for matters of ultimate concern. This essay claims that with a modern understanding of the globalized world, it is no longer the norm for a non-Christian religion to meet Christian-like features to be considered a “world religion”. By adopting a universal model that is gained through observing concrete particularizations, where no one religion can claim to serve as the clear and dominant standard for any other, this essay attempts to re-imagine and re-construct African Traditional Religions. While the focus of this article is on African Tradition Religions, particular focus is given to the Zulu religion, its deity, uNkulunkulu, and its moral fabric. This article rethinks how we have conceptualized “World Religions”.","PeriodicalId":42729,"journal":{"name":"BLACK THEOLOGY","volume":"19 1","pages":"99 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44226444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}