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Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter
Essays on a Moment and a Movement
Black Lives and Liberation
Edited by Christopher Cameron and Phillip Luke Sinitiere
This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion’s place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.
Section 1: Historical Foundations
- "A Secular Civil Rights Movement? How Black Power and Black Catholics Help Us Rethink the Religion in Black Lives Matter" by Matthew Cressler
- "Beyond De-Christianization: Rethinking the Religious Landscapes and Legacies of Black Power in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter" by Kerry Pimblott
- "MOVE, Mourning, and Memory" by Richard Kent Evans
- "Black Lives Matter and the New Materialism: Past Truths, Present Struggles, and Future Promises" by Carol Wayne White
- "The Faith of the Future: Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism" by Christopher Cameron
- "Social Death, Excessive Movements, and the Matter of Blackness" by Joseph Winters
- "'A Song that Speaks the Language of the Times': Muslim and Christian Homiletic Responses to #BlackLivesMatter and the Need for a Theology of Admonition" by Marjorie Corbman
- "'Islam Is Black Lives Matter': The Role of Gender and Religion in Muslim Women's BLM Activism" by Iman AbdoulKarim
- "The Need for a Bulletproof Black Man: Luke Cage and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Religion in Black Communities" by Alex Stucky
- "The Sounds of Hope: Black Humanism, Deep Democracy, and Black Lives Matter" by Alexandra Hartmann
- "Black Lives Matter and American Evangelicalism: Conflict and Consonance in History and Culture" by Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Phillip Luke Sinitiere is a professor of history at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston. He is also the scholar in residence at the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. He is the author of Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity and the coeditor of Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History and Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith.
Christopher Cameron is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a founder of the African American Intellectual History Society, the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement and Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism, and a coeditor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition.