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Black Church Activism and Contested Multiculturalism in Europe, North America, and Africa
Birkbeck, University of London
In 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged the black church to “answer the knock at midnight” and progressively engage in public life. As part of its annual tribute to the memory of Dr. King, native Houstonian Tamelyn Tucker-Worgs, Ph.D., will address faith-based community development in today’s churches—where it works, and where it fails, and how gender plays a role, particularly in the megachurch phenomenon.
The Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race (TRRR) is a community of discourse, focusing on religious responses to issues of race within contemporary western cultures.
Is the religion of our God that impotent? Doesn’t the Christian God demand that followers speak up on behalf of the oppressed? Does it make us “less Christian” if we speak up on behalf of a people who have nobody to speak for them?
Nevertheless, I support #OccupytheDream because it offers an opportunity to energize the progressive religious wing of the black organizing tradition.
Barbara D. Savage, a professor of history and American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, is receiving the prize for the ideas set forth in her book, “Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion,” published in 2008 by Harvard University Press.
James Cone, author of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and a professor at Union Theological Seminary, who is known as the founder of black liberation theology, talks about the personal and larger cultural significance of the crucifixion for blacks seeking justice during Jim Crow.
According to Hendricks's biblical exegesis, Jesus was a class warrior. Jesus said, "Woe to you who are rich," Hendricks wrote. "Wealth becomes unjust for Jesus when it is used in an unjust fashion, or for unjust ends, or when it is greedily accumulated and not shared with those in need of material assistance."
What is the past and continuing influence of African-American churches on U.S. politics?
Biblical scholar Obery Hendricks, historian Barbara Savage, and theologian Yolanda Pierce discuss religion and power in America
To be sure the Black Church is not monolithic. In fact the term, “Black Church” is a rubric for a half dozen predominately Black denominations, dozens of non-denominational mega churches and their fellowships, and black congregations inside predominately white denominations. These various constellations constitute the Black Church. In word, there are many “Black Churches”.
