God’s Word.
Black Voices.

Experience faith and Scripture
through the eyes of African American writers.

Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context. A key element in the fight for hope, he discovered, has long been the practice of Bible reading and interpretation that comes out of traditional Black churches. This ecclesial tradition is often disregarded or viewed with suspicion by much of the wider Church and academy, but it has something vital to say.

Your Price: $12.99

Mobile Ed: CS251 History and Theology of the African American Church (7 hour course)

Carl Ellis is uniquely qualified to teach about Christianity in an African American context and his depth of experience makes him an ideal guide for relating how theology developed over time within the African American church. For thousands of years, God has mightily used many Africans to advance his kingdom. In this course, Ellis delves into Scripture and Church history, describes important movements—like African American missions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the civil rights movement—and analyzes important events happening today.

Your Price: $259.99

The Books of Haggai and Malachi (The New International Commentary on the Old Testament | NICOT)

In this commentary on Haggai and Malachi, Mignon Jacobs offers clear and insightful interpretation of the text while highlighting themes that are especially relevant to contemporary concerns, such as honoring or dishonoring God, the responsibilities of leaders, questioning God, and hearing the prophetic word in challenging times. Engaging with the latest scholarship, Jacobs provides a thorough introduction to both prophets in which she addresses questions of authorship, date, purpose, structure, and theology, followed by a new translation of the biblical text and a verse-by-verse commentary. With intertextual discussions about key aspects of the text and attention to competing perspectives, this commentary offers a rich new interpretation of Haggai and Malachi.

Your Price: $42.99

Longing for Jesus: Worship at a Black Holiness Church in Mississippi, 1895–1913

In this third volume, Longing for Jesus, Lester Ruth vividly portrays a prominent African American holiness church in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early twentieth century. Ruth’s rich selection of primary documents presents readers with a vibrant snapshot of this dynamic church and its pastor, Charles Price Jones, caught between factors that threatened the existence of the congregation itself: Jim Crow racism, conflicting visions for the church, appropriate Christian piety, and social aspirations. In the midst of conflicts inside and outside, the church fought to create a space where it could worship Jesus as it saw fit.

Your Price: $18.99

Rise Above: My 500 Days of Faith, Forgiveness, and Fighting Back

Rise Above will give you a raw, honest look into Steve Zakuani’s story. Let him coach you on how to face tragedy with a positive mindset, how to set goals that are bigger than your adversity, how to remain hopeful in your darkest moments, and how to help others in your life overcome their own greatest challenges.

Your Price: $12.99

Plain Theology for Plain People

In this short textbook first published in 1890, Charles Octavius Boothe simply and elegantly lays out the basics of theology for everyday people. A Baptist pastor born into slavery, Boothe brought the heights of academic theology to his congregants, so that they might be filled with good things. Walter R. Strickland II reintroduces this forgotten masterpiece. “Before the charge ‘know thyself’ ought to come the far greater charge, ‘know thy God.’”

Your Price: $9.99

After: Finding Your Passion and Purpose for What’s Next

Life is full of challenges that often put our resilience to the test—but many people can’t bounce back from setbacks because they don’t know where to begin. In After, Andrew C. Turner, II charts a course for recovery filled with practical application.

Your Price: $13.99

Bread for the Resistance: 40 Devotions for Justice People

Sometimes it’s tiring doing this thing called justice—making the case, fighting the fight, and repeatedly explaining why it matters. You feel burned out or disillusioned. Sometimes you just need a word from the Lord. In these daily devotions, Donna Barber offers life-giving words of renewal and hope for those engaged in the resistance to injustice. When you face adversity, you can take courage. When you grapple with discouragement, you can find hope. When your legs are tired from marching and your knees bruised from kneeling, you can experience rest and healing.

Your Price: $11.99

Prophetic Rage: A Postcolonial Theology of Liberation

In this book Johnny Bernard Hill argues that prophetic rage, or righteous anger, is a necessary response to our present culture of imperialism and nihilism. The most powerful way to resist meaninglessness, he says, is refusing to accept the realities of structural injustice, such as poverty, escalating militarism, genocide, and housing discrimination. Hill’s Prophetic Rage is interdisciplinary, integrating art, music, and literature with theology. It is constructive, passionate, and provocative. Hill weaves through a myriad of creative and prophetic voices of protest—from Jesus to W. E. B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and President Barack Obama—as well as multiple approaches, including liberation theology and black religion, to reflect theologically on the nature of liberation, justice, and hope on contemporary culture.

Your Price: $19.99

Witness

This detailed history of the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York City, begins with its organization in 1809 and continues through its relocations, its famous senior pastors, and its many crises and triumphs, up to the present. Considered the largest Protestant congregation in the United States during the pre-megachurch 1930s, this church plays a very important part in the history of New York City.

Your Price: $25.99

After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Theological Education between the Times)

After Whiteness is for anyone who has ever questioned why theological education still matters. It is a call for Christian intellectuals to exchange isolation for intimacy and embrace their place in the crowd—just like the crowd that followed Jesus and experienced his miracles. It is part memoir, part decolonial analysis, and part poetry—a multimodal discourse that deliberately transgresses boundaries, as Jennings hopes theological education will do, too.

Your Price: $15.99

African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation

In the first book of its kind, Lisa Bowens takes a historical, theological, and biblical approach to explore interpretations of Paul within African American communities over the past few centuries. She surveys a wealth of primary sources from the early 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, including sermons, conversion stories, slave petitions, and autobiographies of ex-slaves, many of which introduce readers to previously unknown names in the history of New Testament interpretation. Along with their hermeneutical value, these texts also provide fresh documentation of Black religious life through wide swaths of American history. African American Readings of Paul promises to change the landscape of Pauline studies and fill an important gap in the rising field of reception history.

Your Price: $29.99

Faithlife Ebook Resources

Dream with Me: Race, Love, and the Struggle We Must Win

According to recent surveys and studies, race relations in the United States are the worst they've been since the 1990s, and many would argue that life for most minorities has not significantly improved since the civil rights era of the 1960s. For so many, the dream of true equality has dissolved into a reality of prejudice, fear, and violence as a way of life. John M. Perkins has been there from the beginning. Raised by his sharecropping grandparents, Perkins fled Mississippi in 1947 after his…

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