Walk Together Children [Hardcover]

Walk Together Children: Black and Womanist Theologies, Church, and Theological Education draws on the long religious, cultural, and singing history of blacks in the U.S.A. Through the slavery and emancipation days until now, black song has both nurtured and enhanced African American life as a collective whole. Communality has always included a variety of existential experiences. What has kept this enduring people in a corporate process is their walking together through good times and bad, relying on what W. E. B. DuBois called their dogged strength to keep from being torn asunder. Somehow and someway they intuited from historical memory or received from transcendental revelation that keeping on long enough on the road would yield ultimate fruit for the journey. This volume flips the script in all the right ways. Hopkins and Thomas collect essays that collectively invert the ways that black and womanist theologies are usually constructed. Men speak to issues that womanists first articulated. Women write about the future of black men. Professors, clergy, and lay people engage academic theology together, and the conversations are cross-generational . . . [T]his volume strongly refutes any accusations that black theology is merely academic. --Monica A. Coleman Claremont School of Theology This work represents an important gathering of the best thinkers from the Black Church, the Academy, and the Black community who come together to address the vital issue of Black flourishing in the twenty-first century. Their specific focus on the role that theological education, as it happens in the academy and the Church, plays in this project makes this timely and essential reading for all scholars, practitioners, and activists. This book will become a classic and be widely used in seminary classrooms and sanctuaries. --Stephen G. Ray Jr. Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary Walk Together Children represents an historic moment of coming together in black religiouló