8 Books Published by Wipf and Stock Publishers on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

There are thirty-eight ethical statements-principles throughout the seven chapters of A Theology of Justice. These ethical statements form a comprehensive corrections ethic informed by the human rights abuses occurring in jails and prisons in the United States, offering evidence-based correctives. This corrections ethic is informed by twenty years of qualitative research inside four jail and prison institutions, as an administrator of both Treatment and Religious Services departments; including the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Leavenworth, United States Penitentiary in Atlanta, Maryland Division of Pretrial Detention and Services, and the Adams County Adult Correctional Complex in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A Theology of Justice is foundational toward a corrections ethic, and reflective of disciplines possessing extensive research in the development of its ethics, such as business ethics and medical ethics.

This book remembers one hundred years since Black Wall Street

Reflecting on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Black Wall Street was the most successful Black business district in the United States. However, due to racism, it remained isolated from the prospering white oil town of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

During the early twentieth century, African-Americans lived under the constant threat posed by white supremacy, lynchings, and the oppressive Jim and Jane Crow laws. This text delves deep, adopting a Womanist perspective, to discuss the moral dilemmas surrounding Black ontology and the existential challenges faced by Black Americans in their quest to live as equals alongside white Americans.

This flourishing Black business district and residential area faced destruction at the hands of white terror, hatred, envy, and the exertion of hegemonic power. Such acts of terrorism were historically rooted in false narratives of Black inferiority and were often legitimized by law and white supremacist ideologies.

Disturbingly, such forms of terror persist and continue to haunt the lived experiences of African-Americans in contemporary times. This research further investigates the relationships between Native Americans and African-Americans, the migration of Black populations to the west, the pivotal role of religion, the invaluable contributions of Black women, the horrifying history of lynching, and the unwavering resilience demonstrated by Black Americans throughout history.

It is remarkable that African Americans, the descendants of slaves, embrace Christianity at all. The imagination that is necessary to parse biblical text and find within it a theology that speaks to their context is a testimony to their will to survive in a hostile land. Black religion embraces the cross and the narrative of Jesus as savior, both theologically and culturally. But this does not suggest that African Americans have not historically, and do not now, struggle with the reconciliation of the cross, black life, suffering. African Americans are well aware of the shared relationship of Christianity with the white oppressors of history. The religion that helped African Americans to survive is the religion that was instrumental in their near genocide.

THE LINCOLN BRIGADE The day after Christmas in 1936, a group of ninety-six Americans sailed from New York to help Spain defend its democratic government against fascism. Ultimately, twenty-eight hundred United States volunteers reached Spain to become the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Few Lincolns had any military training. More than half were seriously wounded or died in battle. Most Lincolns were activists and idealists who had worked with and demonstrated for the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. They were poets and blue-collar workers, professors and students, seamen and journalists, lawyers and painters, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. The Brigade was the first fully integrated United States army, and Oliver Law, an African American from Texas, was an early Lincoln commander. William Loren Katz and the late Marc Crawford twice traveled with the Brigade to Spain in the 1980s, interviewed surviving Lincolns on old battlefields, and obtained never-before-published documents and photographs for this book.

Albert Raboteau was born into a Catholic family in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, three months after his father was shot and killed by a white man. It was during the 1940s, when blacks couldn’t swim at the same beach as whites, when the priest gave communion to white Catholics first and made others wait.

In a moving account of his life, Raboteau tells how the boy grew into a man, married, became a success as a college administrator, then learned sorrow, lost his way and had to start over again. His is an American spiritual journey that is redolent of sacramental Christianity marking the sacredness of time, place, and community. The journey brought him to a conversation that reconciled him to his own past, including his religious heritage, his African roots, and his family members.

In the end his spiritual quest became a journey home, to a human circle that opened to him and brought him to God. Endorsements: "If you want to see why Albert Raboteau is among the most elegant writers now contemplating the most important things, begin with his brief spiritual autobiography, A Sorrowful Joy. Next read the epilogue A Fire in the Bones. Then return to Slave Religion, the book for which he is famous, and you will understand why it first moved you as deeply as it did." —Jeffrey Stout, author of Blessed Are the Organized

Creating Women’s Theology engages women’s questions: - Can women from different religious traditions engage one theological approach? - Can one philosophical approach support feminist religious thought? - What kind of belief follows women’s criticism of traditional Christianity?

Creating Women’s Theology offers a portrait of how some women have found room for faith and feminism. For the last twenty-five years, women religion scholars have synthesized process philosophy with their feminist sensibilities and faith commitments to highlight the value of experience, the importance of freedom, and the interdependence of humanity, God, and all creation. Cutting across cultural and religious traditions, process relational feminist thought represents a theology that women have created.

This volume offers an introduction to process and feminist theologies before presenting selections from canonical works in the field with study questions. This volume includes voices from Christianity, Judaism, goddess religion, the Black church, and indigenous religions. Creating Women’s Theology invites new generations of undergraduate, seminary, and university graduate students to the methods and insights of process relational feminist theology.

Endorsements:
“Fifty years ago Valerie Saivings noted the congeniality between the process critique of the philosophical and theological tradition and the insights of Christian women. This remarkable volume shows how the work of women process theologians and of feminists and womanists who found process categories useful together constitute a single richly textured movement. From the perspective of this male process theologian, this movement is today the most promising expression of process theology. Indeed, I view it as embodying the cutting edge of Christian theology as a whole.”—John B. Cobb Jr. Claremont Graduate School and Claremont School of Theology

Sexual violence is rarely discussed in church, despite the rising incidents of rape, sexual assault, molestation and incest. The Dinah Project, which gets its name from Genesis 34 - the rape of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter - was borne out of the author’s decision to start healing through the church after being raped.

The result is this book and an entire ministry program to assist churches in responding to sexual violence. The Dinah Project describes programmatic ways in which a local church can respond to the crisis of sexual violence in the community. By sharing the lessons of one church, this book proposes detailed methods for instituting a church program.

The Dinah Project provides church activities ranging from providing resources for members to ways to organize a full-time church ministry, and many stages in between. Topics include planning worship services, conducting community education workshops, working with local agencies, establishing a board of directors and holding therapy groups at the church. With checklists, forms and detailed explanations, this user-friendly book guides any interested individual from basic information about sexual violence to tips on budgeting for programs.

The first book to examine the full range of black life from the vantage point of psychiatry, this widely-acclaimed work has established itself as the classic statement of the desperation, conflicts, and anger of black life in America. 'Black Rage' tells of the insidious effects of the heritage of slavery; describes love, marriage, and the family; addresses the sexual myths and fears of both blacks and whites; chronicles how schools fail the black child; examines mental illness among black people and the psychic stresses engendered by discrimination; and, finally, focuses on the miasma of racial hatred that envelops this country, why it exists, and what will surely happen if it is not soon dispelled.