James Baldwins Understanding of God Overwhelming Desire and Joy [Hardcover]

This book focuses on Baldwin's experiences as a gifted black writer who fought valiantly against racism and wrote openly about homosexual relationships. Baldwin's God is a 'mysteriously impersonal' force he calls love- 'something . . . like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you.'Table of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Credo 3. Born in a Christian Culture 4. 'In Search of a Majority' 5. Scarred by the Rock 6. Opening the Unusual Door 7. Coming out the Wilderness 8. Weighing Your Gods and You 9. Declining to 'Imitate the Son of the Morning' 10. That Train's Long Gone 11. The Black Issue of the Holy Ghost 12. Ain't Nothing but Us Up the Road 13. A Miracle of Coherence and Release 14. Postscript ?

James Baldwins Understanding of God: Overwhelming Desire and Joy, by Josiah Ulysses Young, III, is an important contribution to a growing body of religious and theological scholarship concerned with the life and literary legacy of James Baldwin. James Baldwins Understanding of God is a 14-chapter book. Each chapter covers moments in a life that lasted 63 years. & This reviewer highly recommends it. (Ronald B. Neal, Black Theology, Vol. 14, April, 2016)

Young leads readers through a labyrinth of Baldwin's most intimate yet public reflections on the America he knew through a life marked by the tensions between alienation and desire, foreclosure, and yearning. Like the subject of this volume, Young is incisive, somber, candid and loving as he extends Baldwin's vision that 'artists . . . must tell the truth . . . make a confession, and thus surface those dilemmas and secrets that have to do with who we truly are as human beings.' Moreover, he analyzes the virtues underlying such an expensive and fragile vision, associating Baldwin's aesthetic sensibilities with a rare yet desperately needed insight into the sacred. - Dianne M. Stewart, Associate Professor, Religion and African American Studies, Emory Univel³G