Contesting Post-Racialism: Conflicted Churches in the United States and South Africa
R. Drew Smith, William Ackah, Anthony G. Reddie, and Rothney S. Tshaka
Abstract
This volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise, while looking specifically at the extent to which contemporary church responses to race-consciousness and post-racial-consciousness enable churches to advance an accurate public accounting of the social implications of race. Contributors examine Christian institutional and intellectual frameworks within the U.S. and South Africa, focusing mainly on post-movement contexts within the two countries—meaning essentially since 1968 in the U.S. and since 1994 in South Africa. Central to the inquiry is whether churches operat ... More
This volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise, while looking specifically at the extent to which contemporary church responses to race-consciousness and post-racial-consciousness enable churches to advance an accurate public accounting of the social implications of race. Contributors examine Christian institutional and intellectual frameworks within the U.S. and South Africa, focusing mainly on post-movement contexts within the two countries—meaning essentially since 1968 in the U.S. and since 1994 in South Africa. Central to the inquiry is whether churches operate from analytical frameworks, leadership approaches, and programmatic emphases that realistically and usefully grapple with race. Overall, the volume provides little support for the idea that a post-racial era has dawned, or soon will, within the U.S. and South Africa. The volume does lend support, however, to calls for liberating persons and institutions from imprisoning racial constructions, whether imposed from outside one’s group or from inside, while wrestling with the tensions between racially-grounded approaches that account for black suffering and racially-transcending approaches that point (theologically and anthropologically) beyond the socially-constructed self.
Keywords:
Post-racialism,
Churches,
United States,
South Africa,
Racism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781628462005 |
| Published to University Press of Mississippi: May 2016 |
DOI:10.14325/mississippi/9781628462005.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
R. Drew Smith, editor
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and University of South Africa
William Ackah, editor
Birkbeck University of London
Anthony G. Reddie, editor
Bristol Baptist College
Rothney S. Tshaka, editor
University of South Africa
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