Terror and triumph : the nature of Black religion / Anthony B. Pinn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pinn, Anthony B.

Series:

Edward Cadbury lectures ; 2002.

The 2002 Edward Cadbury lectures

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Religion.

African Americans.

United States--Church history.

United States.

Church history.

Physical Description:

xiv, 274 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : Fortress Press, [2003]

Summary:

Given the unique history of African Americans and its diverse religious flowering-in Black Christianity, the Nation of Islam, Voodoo, and others-is there one fundamental meaning to black religion in America? What is the heart and soul of African American religious life? As a leader in both black religious studies and theology, Anthony Pinn has probed the dynamism and variety of African American religious expressions. In this work, which he also delivered as the Edward Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, England, he searches out the basic structure of black religion, tracing the black religious spirit in its many historical manifestations. Pinn finds in the terrors of enslavement of black bodies and subsequent oppressions the primal experience to which the black religious impulse provides a perennial and cumulative response. Oppressions entailed the denial of personhood and creation of an object: the negro. Slave auctions, punishments, and later, lynchings created an existential dread but also evoked a quest, a search, for complex subjectivity or authentic personhood that still fuels black religion today. Pinn's promising work offers a major new understanding of what it means to be black and religious in the United States.

Contents:

"Look, a Negro!" : how the new world African became an object of history

Constructing terror. "How much for a young buck?" : slave auction and identity

Rope neckties : lynching and identity

Waging war. Houses of prayer in a hostile land : responses of Black religion to terror

Covert practices : further responses of Black religion to terror

"I'll make me a world" : Black religion as historical context

Seeking triumph. Crawling backward : toward a theory of Black religion's center

Finding the center : methodological issues considered.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-264) and index.

ISBN:

0800636015

OCLC:

50899280