Black preaching

The purpose of this article is to contribute to an ongoing call for more life-giving public prophetic preaching in the context of multidimensional social injustice in Africa by evaluating some sermons of Desmond Tutu as an African model for public prophetic preaching. Tutu has been one of South Africa's leading sociotheological praxis theologians esteemed for persistently calling for social justice, moral-ethical responsibility and social emancipation. With consistency, he confronts social injustice, exposing inequalities since the apartheid era and continues to do so in post-apartheid. Through evaluation of the prophetic discourse of such a great personality, this article proposes an African theology of public prophetic preaching for social justice and wholeness.

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Preaching is a privilege and at the same time hard work. It requires as John Stott has pointed out careful preparation, sincerity, earnestness, courage and humility. Humble preachers recognise that their style of preaching is only one of many. Failure to do so can easily make their preaching less effective, particularly when they preach among those who are culturally different from themselves. This is a lesson learned the hard way by many African church planters in Europe and Western missionaries who serve on the African continent. A one fits it all approach to preaching usually does not work.

This critical examination of W. E. B. Du Bois' Double Consciousness Theory and the Negro Problem will demonstrate how both shaped his understanding of the Christian faith, thus leading to Pan-Africanism.  Then, it will critically examine how this affected the understanding of religion in the modern understanding of the Negro Problem as witnessed in Black Preaching. 

Next, an examination of the historical and social context of Du Bois' understanding of Pan-Africanism has worked to shape the Black Political Pulpit. Finally, it will explore the differences between the “Du Bois understanding” of Christianity and Pan-Africanism. This work will examine the effects of the Negro Problem on Black Preaching and young African American political activists, with a definition and examination of Black Social Justice Theory.

Rev. Albert Cleage’s contemporary and counterpart, Dr. James Hal Cone, emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a premier academic voice in Black theology. Cone and Cleage’s collegiality is complicated. Yet, their works on Black theology and Black power complement each other when read in contrast. This essay looks intently at excerpts from Cleage’s sermons, “Brother Malcolm,” and “Dr. King and Black Power” and puts them in conversation with excerpts from Cone’s book “Martin and Malcolm in America.” This work shows the variance in perspectives and theological convictions, as well as the rhetorical strategies employed by Cleage and Cone to make their case for the most faithful engagement to Malcolm and Martin’s contributions to civil rights, Black power, and Black theology.

This study provides a qualitative examination of African American Language (AAL) in use and explores the interaction between phonological, syntactic and rhetorical features of AAL and situational factors related to the event structuring, speaker goals, and audience composition. Data for this research is derived from the speech of four prominent African Americans who spoke during the 2008 State of the Black Union. Analysis of their speech suggests that they use switches to black preaching style to redefine their relationship with audience members. Overall, shifts in style correspond to shifts in interactional framework, suggesting that black preaching style allows the speakers in this study to temporarily cloak themselves with the status and respect associated with black preachers, providing a favorable context for the reception of their message while allowing for the display of their ethnic affiliation with the black community.

The purpose of this essay is to build upon and expand the work of Dr. Frank Thomas’s book How to Preach a Dangerous Sermon and extend the boundaries of prophetic rhetoric to more readily identify militancy within the scope of the sacred. This work will not necessarily delineate how to produce sermonic militancy vis-a-vis rhetorical invention. The work will, instead, honor the instructive nature of sermonic militancy and help us to acknowledge our propensity to erase, reduce, minimize, and demonize more militant rhetorical presentations (sermonic and otherwise) that are necessary for the full scope of Black1 liberation projects and social movements to be actualized.

Why does the 21st century Black church have very little, if any, impact on improving the social, political, and economic situations for persons living in urban communities? What comprehensive and practical methods can the 21st century Black church employ in order to improve the lived realities for persons throughout urban communities? As a result of studying researched materials and making personal observations, it has become apparent that the 21st century Black church has very little impact, if any, on transforming the social, political, and economic situations existing for persons of African descent (Blacks/African Americans), unlike the 18th, 19th, and 20th century Black church, in the United States of America (Brice and Hardy, 2015). The aforementioned investigation makes clear that the Black church is experiencing the problem(s) with the Black church’s practice for creating new lived realities for persons of African descent (Blacks/African Americans) living in urban communities. A more in-depth investigation into the Black church’s problem of practice indicates the 21st-century Black church faces educational obstructions that interfere with the Black church fostering leaders of change for addressing the social, political, and economic situations throughout urban ​communities.

I encourage homileticians and rhetoricians to study these sermons, exploring the intersections of religion, race, and rhetoric and magnifying a few voices from faith communities that have received limited consideration in the academic study of Christian proclamation. In addition to recommending this volume to scholars, I recommend it to preachers, especially those in African American and culturally diverse communities. I also recommend the book to Christians who are not preachers or scholars but welcome spiritual nourishment. Finally, both religious and nonreligious readers can learn about race-conscious Christian rhetoric through this anthology.

This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.

The Bible (as it tends to do) supported both the justification of and resistance to American slavery as it was practiced in the antebellum era. Slaveholders and abolitionists alike "re-wrote" the Bible, attempting to bolster the legitimacy of their respective sides. Most scholarly treatments of these biblical interpretations discuss the myriad ways that agents (ranging from the nominally literate to the literary) deploy generally stable readings and reinscriptions of biblical passages as they apply to their contemporary circumstances. Enslaved Americans, however, tended to encounter the Bible orally/ aurally as illiterate people, hearing it performed at second-or third-hand and assimilating its language and stories at considerable distance from the canonical "text." Furthermore, most examples we possess of this language reside in contested documents narrated by the enslaved to problematic scribes. This essay explores how the enslaved wielded the inherent imprecision of their biblical language to articulate coherent, if ironic, biblical worldviews. Assessing the rhetorical and even semiotic distinctions between these two modes of biblical interpretation, I develop a category ("eirobiblical rhetoric") that facilitates critical engagement with the instabilities that result from such rhetoric as it engages particularly with the political and social exigencies of a religiously ordered (and "justified") system of chattel slavery. A series of close readings in the 1831 * The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their rigorous assessments and suggestions and to acknowledge

ABSTRACT Rev. Albert Cleage’s contemporary and counterpart, Dr. James Hal Cone, emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a premier academic voice in Black theology. Cone and Cleage’s collegiality is complicated. Yet, their works on Black theology and Black power complement each other when read in contrast. This essay looks intently at excerpts from Cleage’s sermons, “Brother Malcolm,” and “Dr. King and Black Power” and puts them in conversation with excerpts from Cone’s book “Martin and Malcolm in America.” This work shows the variance in perspectives and theological convictions, as well as the rhetorical strategies employed by Cleage and Cone to make their case for the most faithful engagement to Malcolm and Martin’s contributions to civil rights, Black power, and Black theology.