African American Church

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions.

At a time in which some within the African American community are questioning the place of the Christian faith in the struggle for justice, New Testament scholar McCaulley argues that reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition is invaluable for connecting with a rich faith history and addressing the urgent issues of our times.

New York Times best-selling author Carl Weber is a master at portraying unforgettable characters and complex, passionate relationships. Voluptuous Loraine Farrow is as successful as she is curvy, but life is never easy when you want to have your cake and eat it too. With her husband Leon confronting issues from his past, trouble arises on the homefront - and more drama is on the way in the form of Michael, an ex-lover desperate to rekindle his and Loraine’s once torrid flame.

The Color of Compromise takes listeners on a historical journey: from America's early colonial days through slavery and the Civil War, covering the tragedy of Jim Crow laws and the victories of the Civil Rights era, to today's Black Lives Matter movement. Author Jemar Tisby reveals the obvious - and the far more subtle - ways the American church has compromised what the Bible teaches about human dignity and equality.

Black churches in America have long been recognized as the most independent, stable, and dominant institutions in Black communities. Drawing on interviews with more than 1,800 Black clergy in both urban and rural settings, combined with a comprehensive historical overview of seven mainline Black denominations, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya present an analysis of the Black church as it relates to the history of African Americans and to contemporary Black culture.

The Preacher's Son captivates with all the intensity expected of a Weber novel. Bishop T.K. Wilson is a pillar of the community, pastor of the largest African-American church in Queens, NY, and has always tended to he needy. Running for borough president, he faces one shocking revelation after another that could not only derail his campaign, but also force him to reevaluate his family values.

In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States. Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion.

Carl Weber is the New York Times best-selling author of such fan favorites as So You Call Yourself a Man. The First Lady is the tale of a preacher's wife who learns she's dying and vows to find her husband another woman. There is no shortage of ladies who want her man, but will she be able to find a suitable replacement among the conniving church women?

Three best friends who've grown up together encounter some of the real tests of manhood. All's good for James and Cathy until a woman shows up with James' love child. Suave Brent thinks he's found happiness with a born-again churchgoer - until another leads him into temptation. And longtime friend Sonny is going to need help from James and Brent if he's to have any hope of salvaging his marriage.

There's always a man around the corner, and church trustee James Black should know - he's usually that very man. Meet a deliciously dysfunctional family in this riveting new novel, filled with intrigue, sex, and surprises.

Tressie faithfully prayed every night that God would send her a thug. It wasn't long before her prayers were answered and she met a handsome ex-convict named Payce Boyd. Payce is a fine roughneck and everything Tressie ever imagined and more. That is until Tressie experiences firsthand the reality of being a thug's girl. Seeking solace and comfort in the sanctuary, Tressie soon learns valuable lessons and shocking truths about herself and others.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

Tressie faithfully prays every night that God will send her a thug. It isn't long before her prayers are answered, and she meets a handsome ex-convict named Payce Boyd. He is a fine roughneck, everything Tressie imagined and more - that is until Tressie experiences firsthand the reality of being a thug's girl. Seeking solace and comfort in the sanctuary, Tressie soon learns valuable lessons and shocking truths about herself and others.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

On June 17, 2015, 12 members of the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina welcomed a young white man to their evening Bible study. He arrived with a pistol, 88 bullets, and hopes of starting a race war. Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine innocents during their closing prayer horrified the nation. In Grace Will Lead Us Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes provides a definitive account of the tragedy’s aftermath.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Stony the Road and one of our most important voices on the African-American experience, a powerful new history of the Black church in America as the Black community's abiding rock and its fortress.

It’s real simple. Either you pay the money and live or refuse and come up missing. The Church Street District in downtown Orlando never had a close brush with organized crime - that is, until Patrick Washington arrived on the scene. His ruthless shakedown tactics forced nearly every business owner in the downtown district to relinquish a percentage of their earnings in exchange for his protection. But one owner in the district was not willing to give in to the extortion attempt.

Joy Unspeakable focuses on the aspects of the Black church that point beyond particular congregational gatherings toward a mystical and communal spirituality not exclusive to any denomination. This mystical aspect of the black church is deeply implicated in the wellbeing of African American people but is not the focus of their intentional reflection. Moreover, its traditions are deeply ensconced within the historical memory of wider society and can be found in Coltrane's riffs, Malcolm's exhortations, the Black Lives Matter Movement and the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama.

What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community's fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the Black church in the United States.

The emotional equivalent of a Category Six hurricane is raging through the small Southern town of Barksdale in the form of a rumor that a provocative African American newcomer might be of supernatural origin.