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The rise and demise of black theology: home sweet home in Babylon1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2009

Robert Beckford*
Affiliation:
Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 [email protected]

Extract

I was hoping that this book might end one of my most enduring classroom group research activities. At the beginning of my introductory module in black theology, I send the class to the library to search for all the books written by British theologians on ‘race’, since the First World War. Students return an hour later and acknowledge that there are none. Then I send the group back again but this time to search for books on the subject of ‘animal theology’ (by the same intellectual demographic). On their return each group announces, sometimes in triumph, that there were at least a dozen! I then respond by asking them to reflect on what we are to make of a theological community that appears to be more interested in the souls of animals than British Christianity's sojourn with racialised oppression?

Type
Article Review
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2009

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References

2 Hopkins, Dwight N. (ed.), Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone's Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), pp. 262, $20.00Google Scholar.