Popular Culture
We hear a lot today about how divided we Americans are on matters of culture.
In the 1960s, the Fellowship of Reconciliation prepared a comic book about the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr.
Writers of various sorts, you may have noticed, sometimes take a notion to cast aside their particular genre or discipline and Just Write About Life
The popular music world was abuzz in 1994 when a recording of music 15 centuries old (and recorded over the last two decades) ended up a big seller for the year.
It was inevitable that our de facto federal ministry of culture would be among the first and most visible targets when Newt Gingrich, the Trotsky of the Hard Right, took the House.
Three books recently published by Orbis Books together represent a major breakthrough in African-American women’s theological scholarship. Each is a first of sorts—Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness is the first book-length womanist theology, Kelly Brown Douglas’ The Black Christ is the first womanist christology focused upon the black Christ image and idea, and Emilie Townes’ anthology, A Troubling in My Soul, is the first published collection of writings by womanist theological scholars.
The three books have as their common point of departure the womanist idea, a creation of writer Alice Walker who coined the term in the preface to her 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanist means black feminist, and a growing number of black women religious scholars are appropriating this concept for their own work. It appeals especially to black women who do not wish to be identified along with black men as black theologians, or who see themselves as different from the white women who are feminist theologians. Thus, womanist theology has a distinctive identity of its own. And these three new books contribute mightily toward giving further shape and content to womanist theology as a body of religious scholarship.
Douglas’ The Black Christ essentially follows the approach developed by James Cone (beginning in 1969) to create a black theology rooted in the idea of a black Christ. She introduces the book with a biographical statement regarding her encounters with the black Christ through the faith of her grandmother and the thought of James Cone.
The hottest subject in the religious book market these days is angels (though "souls" are quickly closing in). Angels are so hot that secular talk show hosts are taking note of the phenomenon.
Merton's conversational flavor is best embodied by a series of lectures now available through Creedence Cassettes.