Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, Second Edition: Black Theology in the Slave Narrative / Edition 2

by Dwight N. Hopkins, George C. L. Cummings

Overview

Drawing on slave narratives found in forty-one volumes of interviews and one hundred autobiographies by former slaves, these contributors explore how enslaved African Americans received the often oppressive faith of their masters but transformed it into a gospel of liberation. This classic work demonstrates how an authentic black theology of liberation today must listen to the divine spirit that once fed and continues to feed the black religious experience. This second edition includes three additional provocative essays.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780664225216
Publisher:	Westminster John Knox Press
Publication date:	07/31/2003
Edition description:	2ND
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Dwight N. Hopkins is Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School in Chicago, Illinois. He has written several books, including Being Human: Race, Culture, and Religion and Heart and Head: Black Theology—Past, Present, and Future.

George C. L. Cummings is Pearl Rawlings Hamilton Professor of Systematic Theology at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in Berkeley, California. He is also Senior Pastor of Imani Community Church in Oakland, California.

Editorial Reviews

This study relies chiefly on the 41 volumes of George P. Rawick's The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Greenwood, 1972), and a collection of interviews with ex-slaves conducted from 1936 to 1938, supplemented by some states' collections and a few other sources. The five essayists analyze the contributions of African American slaves to the Christian faith, their combination of African religion and Christianity, and the gospel of liberation which arose from their experience. This analysis of the slave narratives is carefully nuanced (e.g., while some ex-slaves speak of slavery in positive terms, they do not claim that Christianity supported slavery). This challenging book should be read by people of all races.

Library Journal