Fugitive Saints

Fugitive Saints
Author: Katie Walker Grimes
Publisher: Fortress Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2017-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 150641673X

How should the Catholic church remember the sins of its saints? This question proves particularly urgent in the case of those saints who were canonized due to their relation to black slavery. Today, many of their racial virtues seem like racial vices. In this way, the church celebrates Peter Claver, a seventeenth-century Spanish missionary to Colombia, as “the saint of the slave trade,” and extols Martín de Porres as the patron saint of mixed race people. But in truth, their sainthoods have upheld anti-blackness much more than they have undermined it. Habituated by anti-blackness, the church has struggled to perceive racial holiness accurately. In the ongoing cause to canonize Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian-born former slave, the church continues to enact these bad racial habits. This book proposes black fugitivity, as both a historical practice and an interpretive principle, to be a strategy by which the church can build new hagiographical habits. Rather than searching inside itself for racial heroes, the church should learn to celebrate those black fugitives who sought refuge outside of it.

Fugitive Saints

Fugitive Saints
Author: Katie Walker Grimes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781506416724

"How should the Catholic Church remember the sins of its saints? This question proves particularly urgent in the case of those saints who were canonized due to their relation to black slavery. Today, many of their racial virtues seem like racial vices. This book proposes black fugitivity, as both a historical practice and an interpretive principle, to be a strategy by which the church can build new hagiographical habits. Rather than searching inside itself for racial heroes, the church should learn to celebrate those black fugitives who sought refuge outside of it."--Back cover.

The Ethics of Protection

The Ethics of Protection
Author: Lincoln Rice
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2023
Genre: African American families
ISBN: 1506494064

In the US, Black children are twice as likely as white children to be removed from their parents and adopted out to strangers. The Ethics of Protection responds to this dire reality with a liberationist approach to child welfare ethics. This book reframes child welfare by centering the stories, challenges, failures, and victories of Black families.

A Saint of Our Own

A Saint of Our Own
Author: Kathleen Sprows Cummings
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2019-02-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1469649489

What drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest, full of twists and turns over more than a century, to win an American saint? The absence of American names in the canon of the saints had left many of the faithful feeling spiritually unmoored. But while canonization may be fundamentally about holiness, it is never only about holiness, reveals Kathleen Sprows Cummings in this panoramic, passionate chronicle of American sanctity. Catholics had another reason for petitioning the Vatican to acknowledge an American holy hero. A home-grown saint would serve as a mediator between heaven and earth, yes, but also between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was also about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. Their fascinatingly diverse causes for canonization—from Kateri Tekakwitha and Elizabeth Ann Seton to many others that are failed, forgotten, or still under way—represented evolving national values as Catholics made themselves at home. Cummings's vision of American sanctity shows just how much Catholics had at stake in cultivating devotion to men and women perched at the nexus of holiness and American history—until they finally felt little need to prove that they belonged.

Strange and Gaudy Fruit

Strange and Gaudy Fruit
Author: Jeff Nicoll
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2023-05-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666738778

The history of Christianity includes many doctrines adopted (and actions taken) to meet immediate problems but which had unintended consequences; they are bad fruit (Matt 7:15–20). The oldest is antisemitism, which arose from the competition of the early church with early Judaism. It was built into the New Testament and was developed by the church fathers. Having learned to dehumanize, it was easy to apply the same techniques to other groups; the church became complicit with enslavement, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. One response to the bad fruit is to reject religion, in the manner of Christopher Hitchens. However, the dogmas are part of our culture even if in secular form. If the roots of marginalization are not understood, they cannot be eliminated. This work uses a range of critics and defenders of traditional Western Christianity to identify poisonous fruits and detoxify them. The critical voices do not create a consensus. Nevertheless, a core can be perceived, what Erasmus called the “few truths.” Grounded in the religious tradition, they can be shared with secular people as a basis for an ethical, merciful, and respectful society. Although the history of Christianity is bloody, there are ways to go forward.

"Let Us Go Free"

Author: C.Walker Gollar
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2023-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1647123879

A vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding and its historical relationship with Jesuit universities in the United States The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, is renowned for the quality of the order’s impact on higher education. Less well known, however, is the relationship between Jesuit higher education and slavery. For more than two hundred years, Jesuit colleges and seminaries in the United States supported themselves on the labor of the enslaved. “Let Us Go Free” tells the complex stories of the free and enslaved people associated with these Catholic institutions. Walker Gollar shows that, in spite of their Catholic faith, Jesuits were in most respects very typical slaveholders. At times, they may have been concerned with the spiritual and physical well-being of the enslaved, but mostly they were concerned with the finances of their plantations and farms. Gollar traces the legacies of the Jesuits’ participation in the slaveholding economy, portrays the experiences of those enslaved by the Jesuits, and shares the Jesuits’ attempts to come to terms with their history. Deeply based on original research in Jesuit archives, “Let Us Go Free” provides a vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding for the general reader interested in the historical relationship between slavery and universities in the United States.

Black Catholic Studies Reader

Black Catholic Studies Reader
Author: David J. Endres
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813234298

This first-ever Black Catholic Studies Reader offers an introduction to the theology and history of the Black Catholic experience from those who know it best: Black Catholic scholars, teachers, activists, and ministers. The reader offers a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary approach that illuminates what it means to be Black and Catholic in the United States. This collection of essays from prominent scholars, both past and present, brings together contributions from theologians M. Shawn Copeland, Kim Harris, Diana Hayes, Bryan Massingale, and C. Vanessa White, and historians Cecilia Moore, Diane Batts Morrow, and Ronald Sharps, and selections from an earlier generation of thinkers and activists, including Thea Bowman, Cyprian Davis, and Clarence Rivers. Contributions delve into the interlocking fields of history, spirituality, liturgy, and biography. Through their contributions, Black Catholic Studies scholars engage theologies of liberation and the reality of racism, the Black struggle for recognition within the Church, and the distinctiveness of African-inspired spirituality, prayer, and worship. By considering their racial and religious identities, these select Black Catholic theologians and historians add their voices to the contemporary conversation surrounding culture, race, and religion in America, inviting engagement from students and teachers of the American experience, social commentators and advocates, and theologians and persons of faith.

Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States

Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States
Author: Shelton J. Fabre
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2023-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813236754

Becoming What We Are is a collection of essays and reviews written in the last decade by the late Jude Dougherty, which covey a perspective on contemporary events and literature, written from a classical and Christian perspective. These essays convey a worldview much in need of restating when, according to Dougherty, Western society seems to have lost its bearings, in its legislative assemblies and in its judicial systems as well. Dougherty writes as a philosopher, specifically as one who has devoted most of his life to the study of metaphysics. In these pages Dougherty examines the Jacobians, the empirical world of Hume, Locke and Hobbes, and Kant, the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas that opens one to God and provides one with a moral compass, and critiques the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey. Becoming What We Are spends some time inquiring into the character of a few great men viz. George Washington, Charles De Gaulle and Moses Maimonides. Dougherty draws upon and shows respect for numerous contemporary authors who are engaged in research and analysis similar to his. The intent is, with the aid of others to restate some ancient but neglected truths. But more than that to show that true science is possible, that nature and human nature yield to human enquiry, that science is not to be confused with description and prediction.

A White Catholic's Guide to Racism and Privilege

A White Catholic's Guide to Racism and Privilege
Author: Daniel P. Horan
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-09-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 164680077X

Winner of a 2022 Association of Catholic Publishers Excellence in Publishing Award: General Interest (Third Place). Growing up, Fr. Daniel P. Horan, O.F.M., never thought much about race, racism, or racial justice except for what he read in history books. His upbringing as a white, middle-class Catholic shielded him from seeing the persistent, pervasive racism all around him. Horan shares what he has since learned about uncovering and combatting racial inequity in our nation and in our Church, urging us to join the fight. In the spring and summer of 2020, US cities erupted in protests and racial tensions ran high following several high-profile killings of Black women and men at the hands of white police officers. As America watched and listened, many of us became dislodged from our comfortable assumptions about race. Horan recognized this unnerving dynamic as a doorway to the awakening and spiritual conversion he has been undergoing for much of his adult life. In A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege, Horan speaks prophetically to what has become a gnawing unease for so many. With candid critique and reflection, Horan helps us makes sense of crucial issues such as: The difference between what sociologists call common-sense racism and systemic racism. What is meant by white privilege and how is contributes to racial injustices. The Catholic Church’s teachings about racism, how those can still be developed, and what those teachings require of us. Combatting racism in our everyday lives. As a white man, Horan shows his fellow white Catholics how to become actively anti-racist and better allies to our Black brothers and sisters as we work against racism in our culture and in the Church. He offers us the hope and surety of the Gospel, the wisdom of Catholic tradition, and some practical ways to educate ourselves and advocate for justice. Each chapter includes a substantial suggested-reading list. This book is perfect for individual or group study.