Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926-1963

Rabbi Ira Sanders was a dedicated advocate for social justice long before the term entered everyday usage. He led Little Rock’s Temple B’nai Israel for nearly forty years, and was a trained social worker in addition to being a rabbi. Just and Righteous Causes, by James L. Moses, is a complete biographical study of Sanders, and examines how this bold social-activist rabbi expertly navigated the intersections of race, religion, and gender to advocate for a more just society.

When Sanders arrived in Little Rock from New York in 1926, he began began striving against the Jim Crow system almost immediately. His career as a dynamic religious and community leader spanned the traumas of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the social and racial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. This book balances scholarly and narrative tones to provide a personal look into the complicated position of the southern rabbi and the Jewish community throughout the political struggles of the twentieth-century South.

In 1957, he appeared in front of the state legislature to urge compliance with Brown v. Board of Education and encourage the desegregation of school districts. This is an excerpt from that speech:

“The state of Arkansas is very dear to me. It has provided me the opportunity to serve many causes in social welfare, touching both colored and white citizens, Jew and Christian alike. And in recognition of these efforts, the University of Arkansas in 1951 conferred upon me its highest honorary degree—Doctor of Humane Letters. I say this with the deepest humility, so that you may know why I doubly love this State and want to keep unsullied its good name. I would be unworthy of the sacred trust did I not raise my voice in protest of all four measures… I believe that the words of Leviticus 25 are the bedrocks upon which American democracy alone can survive. That are these words inscribed on our Liberty Bell: “Ye shall proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Our nation must be based on liberty and justice for all peoples, whose contributions to the cultural pluralism of our land have been great and varied. The dignity of the individual must never be destroyed by granting the state those powers which would deny anyone the liberty and the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. These four bills on which we are speaking tonight were all concerned with the thought of circumventing the highest legal authority of the land. They will never stand the test of time, for higher than the legal law of the land stands this moral law of God. It operates slowly but surely, and in the end justice will prevail.”

To read the full speech, click here. For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

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Textures of Devotion in Everyday Life

Throughout the past few decades, the study of religion has shifted away from essentialist arguments that claim to explain what religion is and why it exists. It is commonly viewed as something that people practice, whether in the presence of others or alone. But what is meant by “practice”? What Happens When We Practice Religion?, by Robert Wuthrow, delves into the central concepts, arguments, and tools that can be used to explore and understand religion today.

Recently, scholars have begun to move away from trying to understand the philosophy of religion. Using methods from anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and sociology, they now focus on what people do and say: their daily religious habits, routines, improvisations, and adaptations. In this book, Wuthnow shows how four intersecting areas of inquiry—situations, intentions, feelings, and bodies—shed important light on religious practice in the modern world.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“With his characteristic insight and erudition, Robert Wuthnow has produced another gem of a book. What Happens When We Practice Religion? is a broad-ranging and generous text, distilling several generations’ worth of social scientific work on the paradigms of practice that will engage newcomers and old-timers alike.”—Matthew Engelke, Columbia University

“This highly interdisciplinary book offers an integrated theoretical framework and a set of research tools for probing religious practice more deeply. Robert Wuthnow weaves together a vast amount of literature that clearly and effectively advances his arguments.”—Ann Taves, University of California, Santa Barbara

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity

In White Too Long, author Robert P. Jones demonstrates how deeply racist attitudes have become embedded in the DNA of white Christian identity over time and calls for an honest reckoning with a complicated, painful, and even shameful past. Drawing on lessons gleaned from case studies of communities beginning to face these challenges, he argues that contemporary white Christians must confront these unsettling truths because it is the only way to salvage the integrity of their faith and their own identities.

As the nation grapples with demographic changes and the legacy of racism in America, Christianity’s role as a cornerstone of white supremacy has been largely overlooked. But white Christians of all denominations have not just been complacent or complicit; rather, as the dominant cultural power, they have constructed and sustained a project of protecting white supremacy and opposing black equality that has framed the entire American story. Jones challenges white Christians to acknowledge that public apologies are not enough—accepting responsibility for the past requires work toward repair in the present.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“White Too Long is a powerful and much needed book. It is a direct challenge to white Christians to finally put aside the idolatry of whiteness in order to release the country and themselves into a different possibility.  With clarity of moral vision, historical nuance, and the sensitivity of an artist’s pen, Jones has written a critical book for these troubled times.” —Eddie S. Glaude Jr., James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University; author of Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lesson for Our Own

“In White Too Long, Robert Jones offers both searching personal testimony and a rigorous look at the facts to call white Christians to account for the scandalous ways white supremacists have regularly distorted and manipulated a faith dedicated to love and justice to rationalize racism. Jones is a rare and indispensable voice in our public conversation about religion because he combines painstaking data analysis with a sure moral sense. May this book encourage soul-searching, repentance, and conversion.”—E. J. Dionne Jr., Columnist for The Washington Post; author of Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country

“Robert P. Jones’s searing White Too Long brilliantly argues that his fellow white Christians must dissent from their received faith and embrace a theology of racial justice. White Too Long is a prophetic call of redemption for folk who have too often idolized whiteness and worshipped America instead of the God of Martin, Fannie Lou and Jesse.”—Michael Eric Dyson, University Professor of Sociology, Georgetown University; author of Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

According to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., we live at a time in which those who attempt to achieve a new, better America have been challenged by the election of Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. His administration has embraced and advanced the the insidious belief that white people matter more than others, giving rise to horrific events like those that took place at Charlottesville.

Glaude also contends, however, that we have been here before, and James Baldwin was around to see it. Following the abrupt end of the Civil Rights Movement and the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. He wrote about the “after times,” and emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“In the midst of an ugly Trump regime and a beautiful Baldwin revival, Eddie Glaude has plunged to the profound depths and sublime heights of Baldwin’s prophetic challenge to our present-day crisis.”—Cornel West

“Begin Again is an unparalleled masterpiece of social criticism. Glaude thinks alongside America’s finest essayist, matching the master’s firepower, brilliance, courage, and sensitivity at every turn. He pushes, prods and disrobes history, forcing us to face uncomfortable truths and insisting upon our better inheritances. Glaude’s stunningly crafted prose—incisive, vulnerable, and beautiful—is as breathtaking as his brilliance. This book is precisely the witness we need for our treacherous times.”—Imani Perry, author of Breathe and Looking for Lorraine

“In this searing, provocative, and ultimately hopeful book, Eddie Glaude, Jr., takes us on a fascinating journey through the mind and heart of James Baldwin. But a parallel odyssey through Glaude’s own formidable mind and generous heart unfolds as well—an odyssey that tells us much about the way we live now and how we might come to live if we could, to borrow a phrase of Lincoln’s, think anew and act anew. One need not agree with everything in these pages to learn much from them, and for Americans seeking to understand our past, our present, and the possible futures before us, Begin Again challenges, illuminates, and points us toward, if not a more perfect union, at least a more just one.”—Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America and Destiny and Power

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Religious Roots of Progressive Politics and the Ongoing Fight for the Soul of the Country

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,” and who set the standard for conservative Christian values and working to preserve the status quo.

Drawing on his years of reporting, Jenkins examines the re-emergence of progressive faith-based activism, detailing its origins and contrasting its goals with those of the Religious Right. He profiles Washington political insiders, as well as a new generation of progressive faith leaders at the forefront today, including:

• Rev. William Barber II, leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays and co-chair of the nationwide Poor People’s campaign
• Linda Sarsour, co-chair of the Women’s March
• Rev. Traci Blackmon, a pastor near Ferguson, Missouri who works to lift up black liberation efforts across the country

Throughout our history, the Religious Left has embodied and championed the progressive values at the heart of American democracy, including abolition, labor reform, and civil rights. Jenkins uses this book to discuss the past and current iterations of the Religious Left, while changing the way we think about the intersection of politics and religion today.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Jenkins is my go-to source when I want a snapshot of what’s happening in the American religious landscape… demonstrating how a vibrant and undeterred Religious Left has filled the moral vacuum with an unapologetically progressive agenda promoting peace, pluralism, and human dignity for all.”— Reza Aslan, author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“Delves deeply into the origins, activities, and leadership of the Religious Left . . . highlighting the widespread—though not always widely recognized—role that progressive faith communities have long held in political and social causes. . . . A well-researched and timely work of journalism.”— Kirkus Reviews

“A contemporary ‘Lives of the Saints’—a series of profiles of admirable leftist activists whose politics are motivated by their faith. . . . The problem isn’t that there has not yet been a potent religious left; it’s that the ‘religious’ part is too often left out.”—The New Yorker

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City

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 in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans shaped the complex and shifting meanings of “Puerto Rican-ness” and “blackness” through political activism.

While previous work has tended to see blacks and Latinos as either naturally unified as “people of color” or irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities, Lee reveals the permeability of boundaries between African American and Puerto Rican communities. African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers came to see themselves as minorities joined in the civil rights struggle, the War on Poverty, and the Black Power movement–until white backlash and internal class divisions helped break the coalition, remaking “Hispanicity” as an ethnic identity that was mutually exclusive from “blackness.”

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Lee shows that working-class communities have the power and potential to come together and challenge the terms of their political affiliations and social circumstances…. She decisively rewrites the history of the decade and reminds us that the so-called black-white binary has been a means of social control rather than ethnographic description.”—Journal of African American History

“The book painstakingly illustrates the broad scope of Black-Puerto Rican activism in New York City, showing that it encompassed many spheres of social and political mobilization, including those not associated with radical movements. A significant contribution to Puerto Rican, African American, New York, and U.S. postwar history, this book will be an important contribution to the ongoing debate on ‘Black/Brown relations’ in the United States.”—Frank Andre Guridy, author of Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow

“Lee’s thorough and careful research into the history of grassroots politics in the 1960s and 1970s represents an important addition to the literature on the civil rights movement and its coda in New York City. The story she tells of the uneasy collaborations between Puerto Rican and African American activists and leaders in this period adds much-needed depth to the history of New York in general and to the history of civil rights activism in particular.”—Lorrin Thomas, Rutgers University-Camden

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali

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. He examines their autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, letters, and memorable performances to understand how each of these figures used religious faith publicly to reconcile deep personal struggles, voice their concerns for human dignity, and reinvent their public image.

In 1964, Muhammad Ali said of his decision to join the Nation of Islam: “I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want to be.” This sentiment, the brash assertion of individual freedom, informs and empowers each of the four personalities profiled in this book.  For them, liberation was not simply defined by material or legal wellbeing, but by a spiritual search for community and personal wholeness.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“[Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans] offers a fascinating look into the religious lives of four individuals, and Jelks also weaves his own religious narrative in and out of the stories he tells.” –  Anxious Bench

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence

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.

To this day, churchgoing Mormons report that they hear from their fellow congregants in Sunday meetings that African-Americans are the accursed descendants of Cain whose spirits—due to their lack of spiritual mettle in a premortal existence—were destined to come to earth with a “curse” of black skin. It is often more controversial to state the truth, that the ban on the ordination of Black Mormons was a product of human racism. Like so many Christians, it is easier for Mormons to deny their racist history than to confront it head on. But now, as America begins to come to terms with the costs of white privilege to Black lives, Brooks urges a soul-searching examination for white Christians who previously presumed themselves to be innocent.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“It is one of the most trenchant and persuasive appeals to confront the history of LDS anti-black racism, past and present, and is a clarion call for academic intervention in contemporary issues.” — Benjamin E. Park, Sam Houston State University

“Dr. Joanna Brooks boldly interrogates the impact of white supremacy on American Christianity, and specifically her own formation within Mormonism. Her work offers an unabashed examination into the history of racism within the Church. This detailed exploration into how racism lives and breathes within the Latter-day Saint religion is an important read for any white American Christian. It is, in part, a spiritual awakening to confront the demons of racism within one’s religious beliefs and Joanna Brooks is willing and called to lead you into that awakening” — Rev. Dr. Fatimah Salleh, founder of A Certain Work

“Joanna Brooks frankly reminds us that white supremacy doesn’t just happen. It is created, cultivated, passed on, sanctified, then perpetuated through forgetfulness. Mormonism emerges here as the quintessential American religion, but in the unenviable mode of participating fully in the nation’s original sin of anti-black racism. This book is strong medicine without the spoonful of sugar-but precisely the kind of medicine that may help effect a cure.” — Patrick Q. Mason, Utah State University

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

50th Anniversary Edition

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.

In an earlier preface to Black Theology and Black Power, Cone wrote:

“This book was my initial attempt to identify liberation as the heart of the Christian gospel and blackness as the primary mode of God’s presence. I wanted to speak on behalf of the voiceless black masses in the name of Jesus whose gospel I believed had been greatly distorted by the preaching and the theology of white churches.”

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“This text changed the lives of thousands and thousands of young brothers and sisters of all colors who were wrestling with the question: what does it mean to be Christian in a turbulent time in which the vicious legacy of white supremacy was being contested, pushed back as it were?”—Cornel West

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.