Counter-narratives of Muslim American Women
Examining the prevalence of Islamophobia in education, this week's review "underscores the need for MusCrit" as a subset of critical race theory
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Posted on January 20, 2020 in Review of the Week
Breaking white supremacy : Martin Luther King Jr. and the black social gospel
Dorrien, Gary J. Yale, 2018
610p index, 9780300205619 $45.00, 9780300231359
This massive, thoroughly researched volume is the second of Dorrien’s two-part study of the history of the black social gospel tradition. In the first volume, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (CH, Feb’16, 53-2606), Dorrien examined the long history of the tradition in the 19th and early-20th centuries, culminating in Du Bois’s “lover’s quarrel” (as Dorrien calls it) with the black church. In this magisterial followup, Dorrien (social ethics, Union Theological Seminary; religion, Columbia Univ.) focuses on the intellectual forces that produced Martin Luther King Jr. In the first part of the book Dorrien examines the major carriers of black social “gospelism” in the first half of the 20th century, including Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, and Adam Clayton Powell. In the second part he examines King and the movement, noting especially King’s growing radicalism and anger. He concludes with discussion of Pauli Murray, whose message, like King’s, resonates today. This is intellectual history at its finest; acknowledging his own choices, the author calls for others to fill in the social history of the black gospel. A triumph of careful scholarship, rigorous argument, clear prose, unblinking judgments, and groundbreaking conclusions, this two-part study is an indispensable resource on American religious history.
Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: P. Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Subject: Humanities – Religion
Choice Issue: Jul 2018
Examining the prevalence of Islamophobia in education, this week's review "underscores the need for MusCrit" as a subset of critical race theory
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Catch the Oscars last night? This week's review analyzes how aging women are depicted in British cinema.
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Happy Women's History Month! This week's review analyzes South and Southeast Asian women's fiction, uncovering the "relationships between the human, animal, and nonhuman in the face of eco-disasters and climate crises."
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Focusing on the lived experiences of Black faculty, this week's review examines what it means to be Black in higher education.
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