Down by the Riverside : Readings in African American Religion

This colection brings together two generations of scholarship on many important topics in African-American religious history.... A useful and judiciously chosen compilation that should serve well in the classroom. -- Religious Studies Review It serves as a smorgasbord of the study of black spirituality.-- Black Issues Book ReviewDown by the Riverside provides an expansive introduction to the development of African American religion and theology. Spanning the time of slavery up to the present, the volume moves beyond Protestant Christianity to address a broad diversity of African American religion from Conjure, Orisa, and Black Judaism to Islam, African American Catholicism, and humanism.This accessible historical overview begins with African religious heritages and traces the transition to various forms of Christianity, as well as the maintenance of African and Islamic traditions in antebellum America. Preeminent contributors include Charles Long, Gayraud Wilmore, Albert Raboteau, Manning Marable, M. Shawn Copeland, Vincent Harding, Mary Sawyer, Toinette Eugene, Anthony Pinn, and C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya. They consider the varieties of religious expression emerging from migration from the rural South to urban areas, African American women's participation in Christian missions, Black religious nationalism, and the development of Black Theology from its nineteenth-century precursors to its formulation by James Cone and later articulations by black feminist and womanist theologians. They also draw on case studies to provide a profile of the Black Christian church today.This thematic history of the unfolding of religious life in African America provides a window onto a rich array of African American people, practices, and theological positions.

Larry G. Murphy is Professor of the History of Christianity at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary/Northwestern University. He was also Senior Researcher, Religion in Urban America Project, at the University of Illinois