40 Essential Books For Any #BlackChurchSyllabus

The black church has a long and important history in the United States, and it continues to serve as a driver of social justice work in many African-American communities.

To highlight that work, digital strategist Jamye Wooten started a conversation on Twitter tagged #BlackChurchSyllabus, which has generated a long list of suggested readings from scholars and theologians.

“The ask has been to contribute a list of books, articles or multimedia materials that the church should be reading at this time or that you think are foundational to understanding of the black church and doing the work of justice,” Wooten told The Huffington Post.

The discussion, which will live permanently on Wooten’s website KineticsLive.com, comes at an important time in American history, he said, when many churches around the country are questioning racial imbalances and reinvigorating their social justice work.

“As we find ourselves in this moment — whether it’s police violence or the systemic and structural violence that many in the African American community are being confronted with — I wanted to created a list of resources to help clergy think theologically about these times and the role of the church,” Wooten said.

The Rev. Dr. Alton B. Pollard, dean of Howard University’s School of Divinity, is among the scholars sharing their reading lists with the conversation. For him, #BlackChurchSyllabus is important for many of the same reasons #BlackLivesMatter is important.

“The whole of body, mind and spirit are inextricably met in the freedom struggle of peoples of African descent, no less people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, persons on the margins,” Pollard told HuffPost. “Teaching the #BlackChurchSyllabus is to affirm a people long denied to be people and in whose struggle is expressed the transgression of generations and the interrogation of a discordant social order.”

Below is a sampling of suggested readings from Pollard, as well as Dr. Ralph C. Watkins, Dr. Anthony G. Reddie and Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman. Many other scholars have shared their lists — scroll down to the bottom of this article to see a longer compilation of #BlackChurchSyllabus tweets.

Here are 40 essential #BlackChurchSyllabus books, according to the scholars: 

1. James Cone, God of the Oppressed
2. Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ
3. Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Church and Sexuality: A Womanist Perspective
4. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, If it Wasn’t for the Woman…
5. James Hood, Must God Remain Greek?: Afro Cultures And God Talk
6. Will Coleman, Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways Of “Telling The Story”
7. Horace L. Griffin, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbian And Gays in Black Churches
8. Frederick L. Ware, Methodologies of Black Theology
9. James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation
10. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus
11. Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness
12. Katie Cannon, Katie’s Cannon
13. Anthony G. Reddie, Working Against The Grain
14. Anthony G. Reddie, SCM Core text: Black Theology
15. Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up and Over
16. Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio, Cambridge Companion to Black Theology
17. Monica A. Coleman, Making A Way Out of No Way
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Church
19. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
20. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
21. Desmond Tutu, God Is Not A Christian
22. Cheryl Anderson, Ancient Laws & Contemporary Controversies
23. James Forbes, Whose Gospel?
24. Anthony Pinn and Dwight Hopkins, eds, Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic
25. Toni Morrison, Beloved
26. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
27. Derrick Bell, Ethical Ambition
28. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
29. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
30. Alton B. Pollard III and Carol B. Duncan, eds, The Black Church Studies Reader
31. James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power
32. James Cone, The Cross & The Lynching Tree
33. Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God
34. Marcia Y. Riggs, Plenty Good Room: Women Versus Male Power In The Church
35. Emilie M. Townes, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering
36. Mitzi Smith, I Found God In Me: A Woman Biblical Hermeneutic Reader
37. Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do With It: Black Bodies/Christian Souls
38. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation
39. Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900
40. Raphael Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness