R. Drew Smith – författare

Christian ministries often struggle to account for urbanization's growing force, complexities, and reachâ€"and to formulate theologically and sociologically appropriate responses. Urban Ministry Reconsidered features a collection of original essays by leading scholars and practitioners that explores current issues and challenges in urban communities.Together these articles consider how cultural and structural frameworks have led to new conceptualizations and configurations of urban ministry. In addition, they examine the degree to which the social, spiritual, and organizational priorities of urban ministries have been reconceived in response to these shifts.

Essays on the civil rights movement outside the South and since the 1960s.It has become popular to confine discussion of the American civil rights movement to the mid-twentieth-century South. From Every Mountainside contains essays that refuse to bracket the quest for civil rights in this manner, treating the subject as an enduring topic yet to be worked out in American politics and society. Individual essays point to the multiple directions the quest for civil rights has taken, into the North and West, and into policy areas left unresolved since the end of the 1960s, including immigrant and gay rights, health care for the uninsured, and the persistent denials of black voting rights and school equality. In exploring these issues, the volume's contributors shed light on distinctive regional dimensions of African American political and church life that bear in significant ways on both the mobilization of civil rights activism and the achievement of its goals.

Essays on the civil rights movement outside the South and since the 1960s.It has become popular to confine discussion of the American civil rights movement to the mid-twentieth-century South. From Every Mountainside contains essays that refuse to bracket the quest for civil rights in this manner, treating the subject as an enduring topic yet to be worked out in American politics and society. Individual essays point to the multiple directions the quest for civil rights has taken, into the North and West, and into policy areas left unresolved since the end of the 1960s, including immigrant and gay rights, health care for the uninsured, and the persistent denials of black voting rights and school equality. In exploring these issues, the volume's contributors shed light on distinctive regional dimensions of African American political and church life that bear in significant ways on both the mobilization of civil rights activism and the achievement of its goals.

After the 2008 election and 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as US president and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the first of several blacks to serve as South Africa's president, many within the two countries have declared race to be irrelevant. For contributors to this volume, the presumed demise of race may be premature. Given continued racial disparities in income, education, and employment, as well as in perceptions of problems and promise within the two countries, much healing remains unfinished. Nevertheless, despite persistently pronounced disparities between black and white realities, it has become more difficult to articulate racial issues. Some deem ""race"" an increasingly unnecessary identity in these more self-consciously ""post-racial"" times.The volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise. Contributors look specifically at the extent to which a church's contemporary response to race consciousness and post-racial consciousness enables it to give an accurate public account of race.

After the 2008 election and 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as US president and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the first of several blacks to serve as South Africa's president, many within the two countries have declared race to be irrelevant. For contributors to this volume, the presumed demise of race may be premature. Given continued racial disparities in income, education, and employment, as well as in perceptions of problems and promise within the two countries, much healing remains unfinished. Nevertheless, despite persistently pronounced disparities between black and white realities, it has become more difficult to articulate racial issues. Some deem ""race"" an increasingly unnecessary identity in these more self-consciously ""post-racial"" times.The volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise. Contributors look specifically at the extent to which a church's contemporary response to race consciousness and post-racial consciousness enables it to give an accurate public account of race.