African-American Spirituality: A Select Bibliography

(One of my Spiritual Formation classes at Payne Theological Seminary)

What a blessing it is for me to be an Adjunct Faculty member at Payne Theological Seminary! 

My class is Spiritual Formation. I've been teaching this class for many years at a number of theological seminaries, seminars, workshops, both in the U.S. and in places around the world. Through the years it has been my privilege to instruct many pastoral leaders from Africa, and many African-American pastoral leaders.

My Payne teaching began (around 2007, I think) when Dr. Leah Fitchue, Payne's president, asked me to teach part of a weeklong class on Transformational Leasdership. Parts one and two were taught by James Cone and Deotis Roberts. I did part three, and led the Payne students in an entire-day experience on spiritual transformation.

Here are books that line my bookshelf, and populate my Kindle, on African and African-American spirituality. 

Michelle Alexander

• The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Must reading for anyone desiring to understand racism in America.)

James Baldwin

• Notes of a Native Son

Lewis Baldwin 

• Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King Jr. (This is the book to read about King's praying life, a life entirely ignored by the secular media.)
• Revives My Soul Again: The Spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr. (This is the book to read on King's spiritual life, a life entirely ignored by the secular media.)
• The Arc of Truth: The Thinking of Martin Luther King
• "Thou, Dear God": Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits

Michael Battle

• The Quest for Liberation and Reconciliation: Essays in Honor of J. Deotis Roberts 

Taylor Branch

• America in the King Years

Flora Wilson Bridges

• Resurrection Song: African-American Spirituality

Lewis Brogdon

• Hope on the Brink: Understanding the Emergence of Nihilism in Black America

Clayborne Carson

• The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr

James Cone (It was my privilege to be one of three teachers at a Transformation Leadership week-long conference. Dr Cone taught, Deotis Roberts taught, and I was given Friday morning and afternoon to wrap the week up. [Thank you Dr Leah Fitchue!])

• God of the Oppressed
• A Black Theology of Liberation
• The Cross and the Lynching Tree 

Melva Wilson Costen

• African American Christian Worship

Frederick Douglass

• Slave Narratives Collection

W.E.B. Dubois

• The Souls of Black Folk

Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar

• World of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa

Cain Hope Felder

• Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation 

Walter Fluker

• They Looked for a City: A Comparative Analysis of the Ideal of Community in the Thought of Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.  

Obery Hendricks (Hendricks is former President of Payne Theological Seminary and currently Prof. of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary)

• The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus' Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted

Johnny Bernard Hill

• Prophetic Rage: A Postcolonial Theology of Liberation

Diana Hayes

• Forged in the Fiery Furnace: African American Spirituality

Dwight Hopkins

• Introducing Black Theology of Liberation
• Heart and Head: Black Theology Past, Present and Future

Rufus Matthew Jones, Kerry Walters (Note: the Quaker-mystical theology of Rufus Jones deeply influenced the spirituality of Howard Thurman)

• Rufus Jones: Essential Writings

Robert W. Kellemen, Karole A. Edwards

• Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction

Eric Lincoln

• The Black Church in the African American Experience

Malcolm X

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X

John Mbiti

• African Religions & Philosophy
• Introduction to African Religion

Esau McCauley

• Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope
• How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family's Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

Latasha Morrison

• Be the Bridge: Pursuing God's Heart for Racial Reconciliation

Peter Paris

• The Spirituality of African Peoples
• Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives

James W. Perkinson

• White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity

Anthony Pinn

• Varieties of African American Religious Experience

Samuel Proctor

• My Moral Odyssey (Dr. Charles Brown of Payne Seminary recommended this to me.)

Albert Raboteau

• Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South

Luther E. Smith

• Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet

Katrina Dyonne Thompson

• Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery

Howard Thurman (Thurman, in my mind, is the leading African-American figure in contemporary spirituality, not only writing so profoundly in this area but living out a contemplative and active life of Jesus-following)

• Jesus and the Disinherited
• Howard Thurman: Essential Writings
• Meditations of the Heart
• For the Inward Journey
• With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman

Ngugi Wa Thiongo

• Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

Nat Turner

• The Confessions of Nat Turner

Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

• African American Religious Thought: An Anthology

Gayraud Wilmore

• Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans 

Vincent Wimbush

• Bible and African Americans

THANK YOU, again, Dr Leah Fitchue, for the privilege of teaching under your leadership in the D. Min. Program at Palmer Theological Seminary, and the M. Div. Program at Payne Theological Seminary.