General Religion

An African Introduction to the New Testament, written by a wide array of scholars from across Africa, is the first of its kind to engage every book in the New Testament from the African context. Each of the chapters offers a thematic engagement of the...

Published while teaching at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, this work showcases Dr. Ben as a mentor, and gives readers a sample of his interactive teaching style. He combines in this book a dynamic lecture on the Diagram...

In 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones left the predominantly white St. George Methodist Episcopal Church to protest the racism and discrimination they faced. A few years later, both men would create their own African American Christian denominations...

In Black Seminarians, Dr. Ben outlines sources of Black theology before Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, showing how their ideas, practices, and concepts were already old in Africa before Europe was born.

Choose Witness Over WarIt's possible to be faithful in the public square without joining the culture war. In fact, there's a model. The Black church's social action tradition has long rejected the idea that overcoming polarization means moral compromise...

There is an answer to white Christian supremacy that is centuries in the making. For many oppressed and vulnerable people, Western Christianity has been a nightmare. Just centuries after the life of Jesus, the rise of Western Christendom contorted...

A concise and lucid explanation of what religious freedom is and isn't. Increasingly, conservative religious groups are using religious liberty as a sword to lash out at others. In this forcefully argued defense of the separation of church and state,...

This detailed history of the famous Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York City, begins with its organization in 1809 and continues through its relocations, its famous senior pastors, and its many crises and triumphs, up to the present. Considered...

Summoned from the Margin tells the story of Lamin Sanneh's fascinating journey from his upbringing in an impoverished village in West Africa to education in the United States and Europe to a distinguished career teaching at the Universities of Yale,...

This book by Miguel De La Torre offers a fascinating guide to the history, beliefs, rituals, and culture of Santería -- a religious tradition that, despite persecution, suppression, and its own secretive nature, has close to a million adherents in the...

"Dr. Lester has gifted us this book for this moment and for our posterity. He shares searing personal stories of tragedy and hardship that moves the crisis in our educational system beyond statistics and into the realm of human impact. . . . He adds...

"Hey, kid. Kid." A voice in the darkness of the slum dorm. I awoke to my stale, bare mattress. It was midnight. The arm of a male nanny reached into the closet where my bed was, roughly jostling me. "You have to get up. They're coming." A prosperous...