African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, Reading While Black is a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation. In this book, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded or viewed with suspicion by much of the wider church and academy, but McCaulley insists it has something vital to say.

Growing up in the American South, McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. He discovered that a key element in the fight for hope was the practice of Bible reading and interpretation that comes out of traditional Black churches. Now he continues to advocate for that hope, and for a model of interpretation that involves an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, in which the particular questions coming out of Black communities are given pride of place and the Bible is given space to respond by affirming, challenging, and, at times, reshaping Black concerns. Ultimately, McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others.

Esau McCaulley was also recently involved in an event where he discussed Reading While Black with a number of other participants. You can find the event on youtube here.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Although the African American Christian experience is not monolithic, we have generally sought to understand the Bible and live according to its teachings. Along the way, many of us have rejected white supremacist readings of the Bible while clinging to the God of the Bible. In Reading While Black, McCaulley does careful exegetical and historical analysis, explaining and illustrating how interpretations of Scripture by Black people can bolster faith in a liberating God. McCaulley gives us more than a theoretical methodology; he demonstrates how we can approach and apply texts―even ones that were previously used against us―without jettisoning our faith or succumbing to oppressive readings. Reading While Black is a welcome addition to the study of African American hermeneutics.” —Dennis R. Edwards, associate professor of New Testament at North Park University

“When I was a student, I was explicitly and implicitly trained to focus exclusively on the ancient context of Scripture and read ‘objectively.’ Bible study could easily become a disembodied experience. McCaulley makes a compelling case, in this engagement with African American biblical interpretation, that not only is the reader’s culture and experience not a hindrance to interpretation per se but can enrich it greatly. Reading While Black is a unique and successful blend of biblical hermeneutics, autobiography, black history and spirituality, incisive cultural commentary on race matters in America, and insightful exegesis of select New Testament texts.” —Nijay K. Gupta, professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary

“Esau McCaulley’s voice is one we urgently need to hear. This book is prophetic, biblical, measured, wise, friendly, and well-reasoned―and thus all the more hard-hitting. A powerful word for our times.” —N. T. Wright, professor of New Testament at the University of St Andrews, senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South

Between 1890 and 1939, white children rested at the core of the system of segregation, as their participation was crucial to ensuring the future of white supremacy. In Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher reveals how white adults in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continually reinforced race and gender roles to maintain white supremacy.

White southerners recognized that the perpetuation of segregation required whites of all ages to uphold a strict social order, and that the young members of the next generation would be particularly important players. DuRocher examines the practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, dehumanize, and disdain their black neighbors, and offers an examination of white supremacy from the inside, showcasing the culture’s efforts to preserve itself by teaching its beliefs to the next generation. Raising Racists combines an analysis of the remembered experiences of a racist society, how that society influenced children, and, most important, how racial violence and brutality shaped growing up in the early-twentieth-century South.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Raising Racists is a well-written, well-researched account of the ways white supremacists systematically indoctrinated children into a way of life that made rational the cruel, often lethal violence directed toward African Americans.” —Louisiana History

“Hard-hitting…. Examining white Southerners’ memoirs, advertisements for household products, school textbooks, parenting manuals, children’s literature, toys and games, and dramatic productions, Raising Racists reveals the multiple interlocking and mutually reinforcing methods white Southerners used to perpetuate white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.”—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

“Raising Racists reveals the interlocking practices, mores, and traditions that trained white children to fear, disdain, and dehumanize their black neighbors. Through crisp, compelling, and trenchant discussions of school texts, consumer goods, violent rituals of black debasement, and day-to-day lessons in Jim Crow etiquette, DuRocher reminds us how much energy and care went into each successive generation of white southerners the ideology of white supremacy.” —W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894-1901

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion

Much of the religious discourse in America has been shaped by men, but in And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy author Adrian Shirk chronicles the prophetesses, feminists, and spiritual icons who have shaped this country into what it is today. By weaving in her own spiritual experiences, Shirk creates a powerful, personal exploration of American women and their theologies, ones which are often overlooked.

Laced throughout this hybrid memoir are stories of American religious traditions revised by women, with each woman presenting a pathway for Shirk’s own spiritual inquiries: the New Orleans high priestess Marie Laveau, the pop New Age pioneer Linda Goodman, the prophetic vision of intersectionality as preached by Sojourner Truth, “saint” Flannery O’Connor, and so many more. All of these women have had to find their own ways toward divinity outside prescribed patriarchal orders, and Shirk concludes that more and more Americans are yearning for alternative, individualized, feminist routes through religion. As religious discourse reaches its peak and institutional trust dwindles, women, who have spent so much time at the margins of religious practice, can help to illuminate its darkened corners.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“This book is a pilgrimage. It takes us across the country, following in the footsteps of women who heard callings, strange knocks on the walls, and the voice of God. These spiritual geniuses shaped America’s path, and were often disregarded as kooks or charlatans by both the religious and secular world. Shirk treats these women with compassion and restores their dignity, while also candidly and with good humor exploring her own religious questions. This is a beautiful book written with great wit and a tremendous intelligence.” —Jessa Crispin, author of The Dead Ladies Project and Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto, founder of Bookslut

“And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is the perfect hybrid of memoir and history. A stunning literary debut that will inspire you to reimagine everything you thought you knew about religion and politics in America. Here, feminism and God, poetic clarity and mental illness, love and spiritual questing, all come together like old friends who’ve missed each other for too long. Adrian Shirk is one of the great millennial thinkers. Read this book and be exhilarated.” —Ariel Gore, author of We Were Witches

“And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is a powerful, even jubilant, reinterpretation of–and introduction to–female figures from America’s strange spiritual history as well as a tough-minded, open-hearted exploration of family mysteries. Full of righteous fire, and full of grace on the level of the sentence, it’s a passionate act of recovery that will speak to anyone who’s ever been beguiled by the unseen and unsaid.” —Carlene Bauer, author of Not That Kind of Girl and Frances and Bernard

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Being Christian in the Wake of Trump

In Sanctuary, Heidi Neumark uses her 40 years in ministry to explain what she believes is the true Christian calling: to live out a counterpoint to today’s prevailing spirits of exclusion and hatred. Neumark has always strived to make her church a sanctuary for people, and after the election of Trump in 2016 she realized it was more necessary than ever to work against the cruel, dehumanizing, and dangerous rhetoric threatening to consume communities like hers.

Neumark begins each chapter with a quote from Donald Trump that she defies and dismantles with her own stories; stories about supporting immigrants and asylum-seekers being harassed by ICE, offering shelter for queer youth in her city, and embracing her church’s diversity with a Guadalupe celebration. Using her own bilingual, multicultural congregation as a model, she reflects on what it looks like to live out essential Christian convictions in community with others. With this book, Neumark speaks to the deep wounds of this era, inflicted before and during the Trump presidency, and which will remain long past its end.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Sanctuary is a must read. Throughout the book, Neumark weaves together stories from those bruised, battered, and abandoned in the midst of abundance and puts them in stark relief with the oppressive decrees of Donald Trump and his enablers. Neumark’s stories, from her own lived experience, embody the call of the gospel to preach good news to the poor and bring comfort to the broken amid bedbugs, detention centers, and systemic violence and injustice.”— Liz Theoharis, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

“Passionate, luminous, inspired, and practical, Neumark’s Trinity Lutheran Church on Manhattan’s West 100th Street is a place where the simplicity of play meets a righteous rage for change, where faith and morality attain true meaning. Sanctuary takes on the problems of the USA—and of humanity—while recounting, with rich stories and vivid details, how a small church can carry an inclusive vision that transcends boundaries. This is a fine example of the resistance, vision, and transformation that, in her words, ‘these days, and the gospel, require.’”— Joan Juliet Buck, author of The Price of Illusion

“Pastor Heidi Neumark’s intensely personal telling of her wildly diverse congregation’s quest to create community against the backdrop of Trump’s presidency and NYC’s gentrification is inventive, humorous, painful, and oh so inspiring. Our world needs more pastors like Heidi, more congregations like Trinity Lutheran, and more books like Sanctuary. All three offer a divided nation reasons to be hopeful and paths toward healing.”— Cynthia Nixon, actor and activist

For more information on the publication, click here.

Heidi Neumark is an author, speaker and Lutheran pastor who has served congregations in the South Bronx and Manhattan. She is also the executive director of a shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

While existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, Freedom Farmers, by Monica White, showcases agriculture as a site of resistance. It follows the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC) started by renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1967, which was a community-based rural and economic development project. Growing from a mere 40 acres to a staggering 600 acres, the FFC was a hallmark of the Mississippi Delta.

By showcasing the FFC, White expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern black farmers. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans–an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. It offered a community and a sense of purpose to local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers. This book shares a historical story, as well as adding context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces today.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Meticulously researched, trenchantly analyzed, and engagingly written, this book brings to life the culture, the theorists, the scientists, the farmers, and the organizers that have kept agriculture at the center of African American emancipation, civil rights, and present-day movements for human rights and self-determination. From a rising activist-scholar, a visionary book of remembrance and hope.”—Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of Food First

“A refreshing and potentially paradigm-shifting study, combining narrative and an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on archival research and ethnography. It moves the African American agrarian experience into the twentieth century, reconceptualizing it, not just as an experience of oppression, but as a strategic approach to black liberation.”—Sundiata Cha-Jua, University of Illinois

“Freedom Farmers is an incredible love letter helping Black people return to and reclaim our true agrarian, radical, collective selves. Through this important book, Dr. White brilliantly disrupts the disempowering narrative that Black communities have a painful relationship with farming and land. While Black people have suffered tremendously via exploited labor and the violence of slavery in this country, that is not the summation of our history with land. Dr. White documents important historical lessons for us and shows us what we’ve known and at times forgotten–that the land both heals and frees us. This book is an urgent reminder and an absolute must read for all of us.”—Dara Cooper, National Black Food and Justice Alliance

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

A Biography

In this book, author Peter Manseau tells the story of the Jefferson Bible, an edition of the New Testament that was edited with a penknife and glue to remove all mention of miracles and other supernatural events. Manseau tells the story of this book not just as an investigation in the fascinating world of Jefferson’s mind, but also to explore how each new generation has reimagined the bible in its own image, and for their own purposes.

Thomas Jefferson created his bible because he was inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, and hoped to reconcile Christian tradition with reason by presenting Jesus as a great moral teacher instead of a divine one. It was completed in 1820 and then lost for decades before being rediscovered, and since it’s republication it has meant many different things to many different people. Some have held it up as evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation, while others see it as proof of the Founders’ belief in separation of church and state; Manseau, however, works to contextualize it as part of Jefferson’s personal philosophy.

The Jefferson Bible is inseparable from American religious disputes over the interpretation of scripture, and the search for the historical Jesus. The Jefferson Bible helps readers grapple with both the legacy of the man who made it and the place of religion in American life.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Excellent. . . . As Manseau observes, the ways in which Americans have received the Jefferson Bible may be more interesting than the ways by which Jefferson conceived it.”—John Miller, Angelus

“A brilliant account. The reader is in for an enlightening foray that explains Jefferson’s book for what it tells us about Jefferson himself, the cultural history of interpreting scripture, and the religious and political import of how Americans have viewed Jesus.”—Sylvester A. Johnson, author of African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom

“A page-turner for thoughtful readers. Manseau offers a compelling window onto Jefferson’s intellectual processes and a unique perspective on the larger history of religion in America, especially as it relates to American cultural divides concerning efforts to sort out the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith.”—Timothy Beal, author of The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire

In Biblical Porn, author Jessica Johnson delves into the storied history of the Mars Hill Church. A small bible study founded by Mark Driscoll in 1996, it quickly rose to prominence and became a megachurch with 15 total locations. The church closed its doors in 2014 after being beset by scandal, with former attendees testifying to spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, and financial exploitation.

In this book, Johnson examines not only the history of the church, but also how it is that the Mars Hill congregants became entangled in processes of religious conviction. She contends that they were recruited into sexualized and militarized dynamics of power through the use of what she calls “biblical porn”, which is the affective labor of communicating, promoting, and embodying Driscoll’s teaching on biblical masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. It also simultaneously worked as a marketing strategy, social imaginary, and biopolitical instrument, drawing in more and more followers even as it continued to condition the ones who were already there. Johnson theorizes that the congregants circulated and amplified feelings of hope, joy, shame, and paranoia, which the church capitalized on to grow at all costs.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Jessica Johnson’s Biblical Porn is a magnificent contribution to the field of anthropology, especially given anthropology’s affective turn in recent years. Moreover, it is a meaningful contribution to both religious studies and gender studies given its attention to evangelicalism in the America and masculinist studies. . . . Her attention to affect and affect theory, though, is what makes Biblical Porn stand out as an original contribution to all of these fields.” — Alejandro Stephano Escalante, Religion and Gender

“Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill churches in Seattle took Calvinist insecurity to new levels, producing an everyday world of acute affective precarity. His church people lived in a slurry of shame, fear, threat, care, intimidation, hope, joy, and paranoia. Wives were exhorted to be their husbands’ porn stars 24/7, and men—the victims of a nation ‘pussified’ by feminists—should man-up, have sex on demand with their wives, and pursue air and ground war campaigns of ‘riot evangelism.’ After nearly a decade of summary dismissals, shunning, demon trials, disciplinary interrogations, mass surveillance, and financial scandals, Driscoll’s evangelical empire imploded. Jessica Johnson was there for the long haul and provides us with a theoretically rich and evocative reading of this traumatic episode of pastoral governance.” — Susan Friend Harding, author of The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics

“Johnson’s book reminds us that Driscoll was real, that Mars Hill did loom large over the Seattle skyline, and that Driscoll’s liturgy was just as creepy and harmful as we remember it to be, if not more.” — Paul Constant, Seattle Review of Books

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.