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Black Buddhism

A research guide on Black Buddhism supporting the Black Buddhism Faculty Project of the Princeton University Center for Culture, Society, and Religion

Background Reading on African American Religion

Anderson, Victor.  Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1995.

Baer, Hans.  The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1984.

Baer, Hans A., and Merrill Singer.  African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Burkett, Randall, and Richard Newman, eds. Black Apostles: Afro-American Clergy Confront the Twentieth Century. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

Butler, Anthea D.  Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Cannon, Katie.  Black Womanist Ethics. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.

Chireau, Yvonne, and Nathaniel Deutsch.  Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Collier-Thomas, Bettye.  Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988.

Curtis, Edward E.  Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Diouf, Sylviane A.  Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Douglass, Kelly Brown.  Sexuality and the Black Church. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999.

Fauset, Arthur Huff.  Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.

Frazier, E. Franklin.  The Negro Church in America. New York: Schocken Books, 1963.

Frederick, Marla F.  Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Frey, Sylvia, and Betty Wood.  Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend.  If It Wasn’t for the Women. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001.

Glaude Jr., Eddie S., African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions: New York, 2014.

Glaude, Eddie.  Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Glaude, Eddie, and Cornel West, eds. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003.

Gardell, Mattia.  In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

Grant, Jacqueline.  White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989.

Harris, Michael W.  The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Hopkins, Dwight.  Introducing Black Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999.

Hopkins, Dwight N., and George C. L. Cummings.  Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003.

Hucks, Tracey E.  Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.

Johnson, Clifton H., ed. God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1969.

Lincoln, C. Eric.  The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.

Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F.  Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010.

Martin, Darnise.  Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Mays, Benjamin Elijah.  The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature. Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1938.

Mays, Benjamin Elijah, and Joseph W. Nicholson.  The Negro’s Church. New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933.

Mitchem, Stephanie.  Introducing Womanist Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002.

Pinn, Anne, and Anthony Pinn.  Introduction to Black Church History. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2002.

Pitney, David Howard.  The Afro-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Robeck, Jr., Cecil M.  The Azusa Street Mission and Revival. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2006.

Rouse, Carolyn Moxely.  Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. Chicago: University of California Press, 2004.

Sanders, Cheryl J.  Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Sernett, Milton.  Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Sobel, Mechal.  Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Thurman, Howard.  With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Warner, R. Stephen, and Judith G. Wittner, eds. Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Watts, Jill.  God, Harlem, U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Weisenfeld, Judith.  African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.10.4159/harvard.9780674862661

Weisenfeld, Judith.  Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

White, Calvin.  The Rise of Respectability: Race, Religion and the Church of God in Christ. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2012.

Williams, Delores.  Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

Woodson, Carter G.  The History of the Negro Church. Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1972.

Young, Amos, and Estrelda Alexander.  Afro Pentecostalism: Black Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in History and Culture. New York: New York University, 2011.