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American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture. By George Shulman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. xxi + 315 pp. Notes and index. $25 (paper). George Shulman's American [...]

Broadly speaking, the event of President Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize takes on greater significance once we consider how utterly deafening the silence of the Black Church leadership has been on global matters of war and peace for the past decade. Simply put, the Black Church tradition has paid too little attention to the Christian attitudes toward issues of war and peace. Since the start of the twenty-first century, there have been mixed signals regarding the relationship ofAfrican Americans and US foreign policy. I will briefly outline the general terms of what is meant by the `just war" tradition. Next, the article will examine the historic circumstances surrounding Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr's vigorous, yet aborted attempts, to foment a Black Christian antiwar stance in response to the great American military quagmire of his lifetime, the Vietnam War. Towards that end, I want to emphasize how Dr King's 'Beyond Vietnam" rhetoric illustrated a helpful framework wherein the Black Church provides a prophetic witness in its quest for peace, while holding a truer, more meaningful definition of patriotism. Finally, I want to offer a brief glimpse of where we currently stand regarding the war in Iraq and why the Black Church tradition stands poised as a viable source of inspiration and correction for remaking not only this nation but also the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historian of religion Charles H. Long's landmark text, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (1986), has served as a lynchpin for the interdisciplinary study of black religion and culture since its original publication more than a quarter of a century ago. This article focuses on how Long's masterwork has stimulated innovative theories and methods utilised in analysing the origins and varieties of black religious experience in the wake of New World slavery that often have been subsumed under the heavy‐laden concept of “Black religion.” Additionally, this article contextualises the influential nature of Long's work upon the history of black religions in the modern world as modalities of both orientation and meaning‐making by emphasising the book's powerful descriptions and critical analyses of black religious phenomenology. Through a historiography of New World slavery, religion, and culture within the context of the Black Atlantic, this article identifies a cluster of major theoretical paradigms illustrated by recent, far‐ranging studies of race, religion, and culture at the height of the African enslavement in the circum‐Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]