Terror and Triumph

Given the unique history of African Americans and its diverse religious floweringin Black Christianity, the Nation of Islam, Voodoo, and othersis 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.

Author: Anthony B. Pinn
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishing
Published: 01/05/2003
Pages: 292
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.02lbs
Size: 9.64h x 6.00w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9780800636012

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 12/15/2002 pg. 743
Library Journal 02/01/2003 pg. 96

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