In American Prophets, author Jack Jenkins discusses the Religious Left, an amorphous group of interfaith activists that has operated since America’s founding — praying, protesting, and marching for common goals that have moved society forward. This idea is in direct opposition to the typical view of religion in American politics, which centers the Religious Right, an organization thought to be driven by a coalition of fundamentalist powerbrokers who are the “moral majority.” Read More

In Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement, author Sonia Lee traces the rise and fall of an uneasy coalition between Puerto Rican and African American activists from the 1950s through the 1970s in the first book-length history of Puerto Rican civil rights in New York City. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, she vividly portrays this crucial chapter in postwar New York. Read More

In Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans, author Randal Jelks shows that to understand the black American experience beyond the larger narratives of enslavement, emancipation, and Black Lives Matter, we need to hear the individual stories. Drawing on his own experiences growing up as a religious African American, Jelks explores the faith stories of four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali. Read More

In Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence, author Joanna Brooks examines the racist traditions present in her own religion in order to bring to light the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring white people of their innocence. Like most difficult subjects in Mormon history and practice, the priesthood and temple ban on Blacks has been managed carefully in LDS institutional settings with a combination of avoidance, denial, selective truth-telling, and determined silence. Read More

In Black Theology and Black Power, author James Cone relates the militant struggle for liberation with the gospel message of salvation. When this book was first published in 1969, it was the first systematic presentation of Black Theology, and laid the foundations for an interpretation of Christianity from the perspective of the oppressed that retains its urgency and challenge today. Read More

In Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle, author Barclay Key discusses the interracial congregations of the Churches of Christ and how they managed race relations during the Jim Crow era and subsequently adapted to the dramatic changes of the 1960s. Read More

In God With Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942-1976, author Ansley Quiros examines the theological struggle over racial justice through the story of one southern town–Americus, Georgia–where ordinary Americans sought and confronted racial change in the twentieth century. Read More

As a recent graduate of the doctoral program in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Isaac Barnes May specializes in American religious history, specifically religion and modernity, liberal religion, and the religious left. He is particularly interested in the study of pacifism, religion and law, and how religious groups respond to the pressures of secularization. As a Project on Lived Theology research fellow this summer and during the 2020-21 academic year, May aims to turn his dissertation into a book that he hopes will reach beyond academic circles. Read More

In Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment, author Michael McNally explores how Native Americans have repeatedly asserted legal rights to religious freedom to protect their sacred places, practices, objects, knowledge, and ancestral remains. Read More

In The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left, L. Benjamin Rolsky challenges the idea of an American culture war between the religious right and the secular left by examining the rise of the religious left through the story of television writer and producer Norman Lear. While Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s, especially through the realm of pop culture. Read More