Walk Together Children: Black and Womanist Theologies Church and Theological Education

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 religious life and thought of those who live preach teach and think a phenomenology of the sacred self. This critical contribution to the field not only reflects upon but is in itself a theology of ingenuity . . . Through unexpected reversals of authorship and themes the contributors push the bounds of theology in all its forms with provocative insights and challenges for the religious imaginations of both church and academy. --Andrea C. White Emory University Candler School of Theology Walk Together Children is a Sankofa Moment reminding pilgrims on the journey that the unity and resilience of enslaved Africans in the Americas is a testimony to the human capacity for hope and struggle to participate in the Reigndom of God. This book is a welcomed resource for conversations about the rebuilding of family and community whether these conversations take place in the Church the wider community or the academy. --Marjorie Lewis United Theological College of the West Indies Walk Together Children moves with such syncopation and collaborative grace creating new moves with new angles in black and womanist theological discourse. This compilation of courageous and thought-provoking essays spoken by three generations of scholars preachers and the pew is a gripping and compelling read! It invigorates renewed energy and offers timeless possibilities in church and academy relations. --Renee K. Harrison author of Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America Walk Together Children represents the very best of contemporary African American black and womanist theology in dialogue. It is committed and passionate text that illustrates the continued vibrancy and praxis of these complimentary disciplines as we step bravely into this new century. In bringing together a remarkable cast of players from the academy the church and the pew this hugely impressive text will be a must read for many years to come. I wholeheartedly endorse this book and