Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Studies in Religion, Culture, and Social Development – serie

The Gospel According to the Marginalized evaluates the development of liberation theology and feminism in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States of America. While exploring the common elements within liberation theology as a whole, the book also identifies and discusses the issues that are particularly relevant for each region. Encompassing womanism, mujerista, and the Han of Asian American women, the book briefly examines liberation and feminist literature as well. The experiences, reflections, voices, and works of women struggling for umunthu (dignity and fullness of life) or liberation are gathered in this book.

AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church: Making the Wounded Whole is a revealing account of AIDS activism within Black churches in New York City. AIDS has taken a devastating toll on the Black community. Blacks make up approximately 13% of the total United States population, but almost half of all those infected with HIV in the U.S. are Black. Previous research has claimed that these high rates are due, in large part, to the lack of an immediate response by Black Church leaders and officials when AIDS first began to strike Blacks in the early 1980s. The Black Church can play a major role in providing AIDS education to its parishioners and community. However, feeling uncomfortable with addressing sexuality and homosexuality, many Black churches have simply avoided addressing AIDS believing that such conversations were inappropriate for church. As a result, The Balm in Gilead was formed in 1992 to encourage AIDS awareness among Black religious institutions. The Balm in Gilead is now the largest organization to work exclusively with the Black Church to promote AIDS education and awareness.In AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church, Angelique Harris examines the formation of the Black Church AIDS movement and the organizational development of The Balm in Gilead. This research begins from the perspective that the Black Church is working to address AIDS, and details how this work is being done. Harris couches her findings within social movement theory, the sociology of health and illness, social marketing, and the social construction of knowledge. This text provides a unique lens through which to examine AIDS discourse within the Black community. AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church is essential reading for AIDS scholars, researchers, and community activists alike.

James Cone and Thomas Sowell tower as African American intellectuals who have influenced ideas around the world for decades on issues such as poverty and justice. Although Thomas Sowell writes as a secular economist, his views harmonize more genuinely with classical Christian social thought than do the liberation theology of James Cone. In the traditional black church, theology and economics have always been partners in pursuing the means of liberation for African Americans. This is the first book to put a black economist and a black theologian into direct dialogue with one another in order to distill the strengths of each discipline, thus providing a long-term vision for the economic sustainability of the black community. The implications of the Protestant teaching of sphere sovereignty and the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity inform the disciplines of theology, economics, and political philosophy to cast a new vision for black liberation serving religious and political theorists alike. A provocative dynamism emerges because Cone and Sowell maintain alternative and competing visions that engage classical Christian theology in different ways. This book offers the opportunity for a new trajectory of dialogue between theologians and political economists about poverty, human dignity, and justice in ways previously unexplored. The Political Economy of Liberation is an invaluable resource in courses in African American studies, race and religion, political economy, social ethics, Christianity and society, Christian social thought, social justice, and theological ethics at the upper-level undergraduate or graduate level.