Reading Black Books

How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just

Atcho, Claude

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781493437009
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Christianity Today 2023 Book Award Finalist (Culture & the Arts)
Midwest Book Review 2023 Gold Book Award Winner (Nonfiction - Religion/Philosophy) Learning from Black voices means listening to more than snippets. It means attending to Black stories. Reading Black Books helps Christians hear and learn from enduring Black voices and stories as captured in classic African American literature. Pastor and teacher Claude Atcho offers a theological approach to 10 seminal texts of 20th-century African American literature. Each chapter takes up a theological category for inquiry through a close literary reading and theological reflection on a primary literary text, from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son to Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. The book includes end-of-chapter discussion questions. Reading Black Books helps readers of all backgrounds learn from the contours of Christian faith formed and forged by Black stories, and it spurs continued conversations about racial justice in the church. It demonstrates that reading about Black experience as shown in the literature of great African American writers can guide us toward sharper theological thinking and more faithful living.

Notes

Introduction

1. Roger Ebert, “Ebert’s Walk of Fame Remarks,” RogerEbert.com, June 24, 2005, https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/eberts-walk-of-fame-remarks.

2. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 5.

3. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (New York: Signet Classics, 1997), 120.

Chapter 1 Image of God

1. DeNeen L. Brown, “‘I Am a Man’: The Ugly Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike That Led to MLK’s Assassination,” Washington Post, February 12, 2018, https://www.wash ingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/12/i-am-a-man-the-1968-memphis-sanitation-workers-strike-that-led-to-mlks-assassination.

2. Brown, “‘I Am a Man.’” See also Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 684–85.

3. For a helpful introductory overview on the imago Dei, see Beth Felker Jones, Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 97–116.

4. Gerald Bray, “The Image of God,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Brannon Ellis and Mark Ward (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2018).

5. Anthony A. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 73.

6. Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 21.

7. Cortez, Theological Anthropology, 9.

8. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 55.

9. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1994), 3.

10. Hoekema, Created in God’s Image, 73.

11. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

12. Ellison, Invisible Man, 3.

13. Ellison, Invisible Man, 18.

14. Ellison, Invisible Man, 32.

15. Ellison, Invisible Man, 31–32.

16. Ellison, Invisible Man, 31.

17. Bruce L. Fields, Introducing Black Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 67.

18. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015), 10.

19. Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman? (United Kingdom: Penguin, 2020).

20. Ellison, Invisible Man, 253.

21. Invisible’s early perspectives on personal responsibility and education are clear allusions to the philosophies of Booker T. Washington, as are the Negro college, its statue and rhetoric, and the references to the Founder in the novel’s first two chapters.

22. Ellison, Invisible Man, 138.

23. Ellison, Invisible Man, 147.

24. Ellison, Invisible Man, 159–60.

25. Ellison, Invisible Man, 15.

26. Fields, Introducing Black Theology, 67.

27. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon, 1996), 39.

28. Ellison, Invisible Man, 298.

29. Ellison, Invisible Man, 465–66.

30. Ellison, Invisible Man, 499.

31. Ellison, Invisible Man, 500.

32. Michael Eric Dyson, “We draw breath. They draw conclusions. Our lives draw to an end.,” Twitter, May 27, 2020, 11:43 a.m., https://twitter.com/michaeledyson/status/1265670025152794629.

33. Kevin DeYoung, “Thinking Theologically about Racial Tensions: The Image of God,” The Gospel Coalition, July 15, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/thinking-theologically-about-racial-tensions-the-image-of-god.

34. Ellison, Invisible Man, 500.

35. See Ralph Ellison, “The Novel as a Function of American Democracy,” in The Collected Essays of ...

Table of contents

• iEndorsements
• iiiHalf Title Page
• vTitle Page
• viCopyright Page
• viiDedication
• ixContents
• 1Introduction
• 91 Image of God
• 272 Sin
• 393 God
• 574 Jesus
• 755 Salvation
• 916 Racism
• 1097 Healing and Memory
• 1278 Lament
• 1439 Justice
• 15910 Hope
• 173Acknowledgments
• 175Discussion Questions
• 181Notes
• 195Back Cover