Part of BIPOC UU Connections
Browse this curated list of books by BIPOC UU theologians.
The title are listed by date published, newest first. If you know of a resource that is not listed, please send an email to the address at the bottom of the page with your suggestion.
A Master Class on Being Human
A Black Christian and a Black Secular Humanist on Religion, Race, and Justice by Brad Braxton and Anthony Pinn (2023)
Brad Braxton and Anthony Pinn represent two traditions—Christianity and Secular Humanism respectively—that have for centuries existed in bitter opposition. For too long, people with different worldviews have disparaged and harmed one another. Instead of fighting each other, Braxton and Pinn talk with, listen to, and learn from one another. Their wide-ranging conversation demonstrates the possibility of fruitful exchange that accounts for—rather than masks—their differences.
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When Color Blindness Isn’t the Answer
Essays in Race, Religion & Cultural Production by Anthony Pinn (2017)
The future of the United States rests in many ways on how the ongoing challenge of racial injustice in the country is addressed. Yet, humanists remain divided over what if any agenda should guide humanist thought and action toward questions of race. In this volume, Anthony B. Pinn makes a clear case for why humanism should embrace racial justice as part of its commitment to the well-being of life in general and human flourishing in particular. As a first step, humanists should stop asking why so many racial minorities remain committed to religious traditions that have destroyed lives, perverted justice, and justified racial discrimination. Rather, Pinn argues, humanists must first confront a more pertinent and pressing question: why has humanism failed to provide a more compelling alternative to theism for so many minority groups? For only with a bit of humility and perspective-and a recognition of the various ways in which we each contribute to racial injustice-can we truly fight for justice.
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When Color Blindness Isn’t the Answer Discussion Guide (pdf)
More books by Black UU theologian Anthony Pinn
Love Beyond Belief
Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness by Thandeka (2018)
Using insights from the brain science of emotions, Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness narrates two millennia of lost-and-found stories about love beyond belief as the access point to the heart and soul of spirit.
The Call to Care
Essays by Unitarian Universalist Chaplains edited by Karen Hutt (2016)
In sixteen heartfelt and thoughtful essays, Unitarian Universalist chaplains provide a close-up view of their day-to-day ministry in hospitals, hospices, prisons, the military, the police force, and rehabilitation centers.
Introduction to Womanist Theology
By Stephanie Mitchem (2014)
Introducing Womanist Theology demonstrates how theology by women of color is firmly rooted in their varied life experiences. By participating fully in the construction of theology instead of simply learning theology from others, black women are able to analyze church teachings, develop meaningful systems of ethics, and challenge ecclesiastical structures, if needed.Introducing Womanist Theology describes the unique experiences of African American women and explores not only what theology is, but how it is constructed. It lays out the major components of womanist theology while showing the close links between womanist theology and womanist ethics.
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African American Folk Healing
By Stephanie Mitchem (2007)
Cure a nosebleed by holding a silver quarter on the back of the neck. Treat an earache with sweet oil drops. Wear plant roots to keep from catching colds. Within many African American families, these kinds of practices continue today, woven into the fabric of black culture, often communicated through women. Such folk practices shape the concepts about healing that are diffused throughout African American communities and are expressed in myriad ways, from faith healing to making a mojo.
Stephanie Y. Mitchem presents a fascinating study of African American healing. She sheds light on a variety of folk practices and traces their development from the time of slavery through the Great Migrations. She explores how they have continued into the present and their relationship with alternative medicines. Through conversations with black Americans, she demonstrates how herbs, charms, and rituals continue folk healing performances. Mitchem shows that these practices are not simply about healing; they are linked to expressions of faith, delineating aspects of a holistic epistemology and pointing to disjunctures between African American views of wellness and illness and those of the culture of institutional medicine.
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African American Women Tapping Power & Spiritual Wellness
By Stephanie Mitchem (2004)
Mitchem explores African American women's religious practices and spirituality from the perspective of healing. She asserts that the embedded practices and functions of health can indicate black women's value and meaning, and such understanding becomes a rich ground for womanist theologians. Mitchem uses and affirms this vision statement throughout her resource, and insists this wholistic approach is impossible without both individual and group empowerment. She offers a bird's eye view into the historical issues related to African American women's health and its relationship to spirituality, and connects it to the wider American structure. She further strengthens her work by including the voices of the women she has interviewed
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Soul Work
Anti-racist Theologies in Dialogue edited by Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones (2003)
What theological or philosophical beliefs bind us together in our shared struggle against racism? What are the costs of racism, for the oppressors and for the oppressed? These collected papers address questions that help us understand the complexity of racism, encouraging readers to reconsider long-held beliefs. A resource presenting many points of view, Soul Work can be used for individual reflection and study, for book discussion groups or adult education classes, for church leadership discussions or minister’s retreats, for Sunday programs, and to create or supplement anti-racism workshops. Each paper is followed by a transcript of the resulting responses, a summary of the major points and questions for personal or group reflection.
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Learning to Be White
Money, Race, and God in America by Thandeka (1999)
In the experience of every Euro-American, there is a moment in childhood when he or she is "inducted" into whiteness. The result is an unusual racial victim, someone who had to become white in order to survive, and the price of admission to the white race includes child abuse, ethnic conflicts, class exploitation, lost self-esteem, and a general feeling of self contempt. These are the wages of whiteness. Personal stories, based on original interviews, introduce the problem of the shame that Euro-Americans feel when they are forced to become white. The rest of the book explains it using social history, class analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic shame theory.
The Embodied Self
Friedrich Schleiermacher's Solution to Kant's Problem of the Empirical Self by Thandeka (1999)
This book investigates the philosophic notion of self-consciousness found in the work of Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher. Its central focus is on Schleiermacher’s Dialektik, a posthumously published series of lectures delivered in Berlin between 1811 and 1831. In these lectures, we find Schleiermacher’s most detailed delineation of the two-tiered structure of feeling (Gefühl) that established him as the father of modern Protestant theology. We also find his solution to the gap between the noumenal and empirical self in Kant’s theory of self-consciousness that post-Kantian idealists attempt but failed to resolve. Schleiermacher correctly foresaw the nihilistic end to which the philosophical tradition of speculative self-consciousness would lead.
Is God a White Racist?
A Preamble to Black Theology by William Jones (1973)
If a benevolent God has dominion over human history, why do certain ethnicities suffer so disproportionately? William Jones first posed this question 20 years ago. Now his critique of the black theology movement is available again, with its examination of evil and the nature of suffering, and its message of hope for ending oppression. This edition includes a foreword in which the author responds to critics who condemn it these that the black Christianity was not a vehicle for liberation but a form of misreligion that fulfilled a vital role in keeping blacks oppressed.