What does religion have to do with fomenting or transcending violence? In this fascinating work, Kirk-Duggan documents and analyzes religion's involvement in violence, for good and ill, in the Bible, slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the youth scene of today.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Eyes on the Prize: Womanist Reflections
What Is a "Womanist"?
Womanist Vision: Thinking and Seeing
Emancipatory Womanist Theology
A Life of Stewardship
Components of Womanist Engagement
bell hooks and Killing Rage
Womanist Theory: A Refiner's Fire
2. Take No Prisoners: Biblical Women Engaged in Violence
Women Warriors and Coconspirators
Assets of Power and the Place of Sex
Violence against Women and Children
Mimetic Desire and the Scapegoat Mechanism
Women Who Kill: Biblical Women in Modern Perspective
3. Lay My Burden Down: Spirituality Transcends Antebellum Violence
The Refining Fire of African American Spirituals
Myth, Ritual, and Oral and Written History
Rhetorical-Musical Analysis of the Spirituals
A Quest for Justice amid Life and Power
Synthesis: Creative Spirituality Signified
Analyzing Individual Spirituals
The Spirituals as Creative Change
4. Sojourner's Sisters: 1960s Women Freedom Fighters Right Civil Wrongs
African American Women Activists of the Nineteenth Century and the 1960s
This Little Light of Mine: Those Who Accomplished in Spite of
5. Ballads, Not Bullets: The Nonviolent Protest Ministry of Martin Luther King Jr.
Freedom Songs: African America's Spirituals Redacted
Wade in the Water: The Turbulent 1960s
America's Civil Religion
The Ethics and Theology of Martin Luther King Jr.
The Movement Since 1955
How Music Moved the Movement
King and the Role of Women
6. Soul Sisters: Girls in Gangs and Sororities
African American Sororities
Gangs Defined: Then and Now
Gangs and Sororities: Catalysts of Culture
Sororities and Sistah Gangs: A Socio-Historical Review
Black Women in Sistah Gangs
Imitative Activity of Sororities, Gangs, and Crews
Internal and External Onus: Society's Response and Expectations
Gang Summits
The Value of Girls and Women
7. Build Up, Break Down: Language as Empowerment and Annihilation
Language: An Accessible Life-Giving and Death-Causing Mechanism
Culture Provides Answers to Human Questions
The Scapegoating Mechanism
The Control of Violence
Language Connects Body, Mind, and Soul
Transformation
8. Daughters of Zelophehad: A Constructive Analysis of Violence
The Story of the Daughters of Zelophehad
Genesis 12:1-3 and the Priestly, Everlasting Covenant
Divine and Human Violence
Violence and Patriarchy
Violence and Imago Dei
Violence in Society: A Necessity?
Refiner's Fire: A Constructive Theology and Ethics of Violence
The Spiritual Life as Confessional Existence
Ethics: The Value Factors
Theory and Praxis and the Escalation of Violence
Womanist Theory Embodies God's Powerful Grace
9. Death as Worship: Celebrating Dying as Part of Life
Death: A Turnstile to the Unknown
Death: A Transition of Time-Ordered Life
Liturgical Seasons: Life Processes
Liturgical Moments: Death as Process
Womanist Liturgics: Hurting, Pain, and Grief
Notes
Index
About the Author :
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan is an African American womanist theologian; a professor, author, and poet; and an elder in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. She is professor emerita of religion and women's studies, as well as director of Women's Studies, at Shaw University Divinity School.
