Is God a white racist? Posed by William R. Jones in his ground-breaking book of the same name, this question disrupted the theological assumptions that marked Black religious thought from early writings of the 1800s to the formation of Black theology in the 1960s. This book compiles his key and essential writings related to over three decades of critical reflection on race, religion, secularism, and oppression in the United States. Over the course of 30 years, Jones pushed questions and considerations that refined Black theology and that gave greater shape to and understanding of Black philosophers' intervention into issues of racial and structural inequality. His philosophical work, related to the grid of oppression, fosters an approach to the nature and meaning of oppression in the United States, encouraging rational interrogation of structures of injustice and thought patterns supporting those structures. Still relevant today, the straightforward style of communication used by Jones makes these essays easily accessible to a popular audience, while maintaining intellectual rigor, making the book also suitable for an academy-based audience.

Is God a white racist? Posed by William R. Jones in his ground-breaking book of the same name, this question disrupted the theological assumptions that marked Black religious thought from early writings of the 1800s to the formation of Black theology in the 1960s. This book compiles his key and essential writings related to over three decades of critical reflection on race, religion, secularism, and oppression in the United States. Over the course of 30 years, Jones pushed questions and considerations that refined Black theology and that gave greater shape to and understanding of Black philosophers' intervention into issues of racial and structural inequality. His philosophical work, related to the grid of oppression, fosters an approach to the nature and meaning of oppression in the United States, encouraging rational interrogation of structures of injustice and thought patterns supporting those structures. Still relevant today, the straightforward style of communication used by Jones makes these essays easily accessible to a popular audience, while maintaining intellectual rigor, making the book also suitable for an academy-based audience.

A revealing look at the identity and mission of the Black church What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community’s fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the Black church in the United States. For decades the Black church and Black theology have held each other at arm’s length. Black theology has emphasized the role of Christian faith in addressing racism and other forms of oppression, arguing that Jesus urged his disciples to seek the freedom of all peoples. Meanwhile, the Black church, even when focused on social concerns, has often emphasized personal piety rather than social protest. With the rising influence of white evangelicalism, biblical fundamentalism, and the prosperity gospel, the divide has become even more pronounced. In The Divided Mind of the Black Church, Raphael G. Warnock, Senior Pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., traces the historical significance of the rise and development of Black theology as an important conversation partner for the Black church. Calling for honest dialogue between Black and womanist theologians and Black pastors, this fresh theological treatment demands a new look at the church’s essential mission.

In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.

One of BuzzFeed's 24 Best Fiction Books of 2015 "As Simon, a lonely research librarian, searches frantically for the key to a curse that might be killing the women in his family, he learns strange and fascinating secrets about their past. A tale full of magic and family mystery, The Book of Speculation will keep you up all night reading."—Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeed Simon Watson, a young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling carnival. One June day, an old book arrives on Simon's doorstep, sent by an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation. Fragile and water damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s, who reports strange and magical things, including the drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of "mermaids" in Simon's family have drowned--always on July 24, which is only weeks away. As his friend Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister. Could there be a curse on Simon's family? What does it have to do with the book, and can he get to the heart of the mystery in time to save Enola? In the tradition of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, The Book of Speculation--with two-color illustrations by the author--is Erika Swyler's moving debut novel about the power of books, family, and magic.

Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation provides a unique introduction to research-creation as a methodology, and a series of exemplifications of research-creation projects in practice with a range of participants including secondary school students, artists, and academics. In conversation with leading scholars in the field, the book outlines research-creation as transdisciplinary praxis embedded in queer-feminist anti-racist politics. It provides a methodological overview of how the author approaches research-creation projects at the intersection of literary arts, textuality, artistic practice, and pedagogies of writing, drawing on concepts related to the feminist materialisms, including speculative thought, affect theories, queer theory, and process philosophy. Further, it troubles representationalism in qualitative research in the arts. The book demonstrates how research-creation operates through the making of or curating of art or cultural productions as an integral part of the research process. The exemplification chapters engage with the author’s research-creation events with diverse participants all focused on text-based artistic projects including narratives, inter-textual marginalia art, postcards, songs, and computer-generated scripts. The book is aimed at graduate students and early career researchers who mobilize the literary arts, theory, and research in transdisciplinary settings.

Is contemporary Black British gospel music a coloniality? What theological message is really conveyed in these songs? In this book, Robert Beckford shows how the Black British contemporary gospel music tradition is in crisis because its songs continue to be informed by colonial Christian ideas about God. Beckford explores the failure of both African and African Caribbean heritage Churches to Decolonise their faith, especially the doctrine of God, biblical interpretation and Black ontology. This predicament has left song leaders, musicians and songwriters with a reservoir of ideas that aim to disavow engagement with the social-historical world, black Biblical interpretation and the necessity of loving blackness. This book is decolonisation through praxis. Reflecting on the conceptual social justice album 'The Jamaican Bible Remix' (2017) as a communicative resource, Beckford shows how to develop production tools to inscribe decolonial theological thought onto Black British music(s). The outcome of this process is the creation of a decolonial contemporary gospel music genre. The impact of the album is demonstrated through case studies in national and international contexts.