Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology:

The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology. Edited by Dwight N. Hopkins and Edward P. Antonio. Cambridge Companions to Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiv + 350 pp. $99.99 (cloth), $29.99 (paper).Do Black lives really matter? That is the burning national question today. The follow-up retort that is also being raised is: Matter to whom? The names of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Gamer, Akai Gurley, and Tamir Rice have raised the national conscience to such a level that there have been demonstrations and protests against racial injustice all over the United States, and beyond, for several months. These are five Black men whose lives have been taken by white men, mainly police officers, without any judicial consequences. So, just as it is crucial to ask what it means to be Black, it is also very important to assess the meaning and measure of Black religious experiences, cultural expressions, and socio-political expectations.The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology provides a valuable compendium of sources for a systematic attempt toward finding an authentic answer. It is valuable mainly since it offers theological reflections from a variety of contexts in which Black people the world over continue to struggle for vital and viable alternatives to the realities of the status quo. Such realities include variations of social negation and cultural alienation, historical subjugation and exploitation, economic oppression, and industrial domination. These realities have traditionally been reinforced by conditions of persistent poverty, political dependence, and systemic injustice. This is why the naming of those five Black men in the previous paragraph has now become a national metaphor for what is patently wrong with our social order. Black people continue to be treated as "the wretched of the Earth," to use Franz Fanons famous phrase. I am still committed to the proposition that Black people are the only people on the Earth whose claims to be fully human have not yet been universally acknowledged. Thus the Companion introduces a range of historical, theological, thematic, and global insights that seek to bring the reader into a fertile encounter with Theology from the Other Side, rather than from the Underside.The Companion is conveniently divided into three sections: "Introduction," "Themes in Black Theology," and "Global Expressions of Black Theology." The introductory material lays out the historical and theoretical antecedents of the new theological enterprise, and seeks to align the Black theological perspective with the broader designs of "liberation." The material links the theological perspectives with the modes of Black resistance and resilience in Africa and America, and draws some attention to the encounters with some aspects of womanist theology, under the guidance of one of its founders, Delores Williams. However, there is an absence of the more pervasive forms of Black theological initiatives that have clearly demonstrated that such commonly held religious and spiritual notions have given rise to theologies of Protest (in striving to negate the Negation), theologies of Affirmation (through song, spoken word, and mutual solidarity among people of color), and theologies of Transformation (through grassroots efforts to restore a sense of human dignity and social worth in organized groupings and other modes of civic advancement). This means that, far from classifying Black theology as a version of liberation theology, the groundings of Black people s experiences throughout the world have made it possible to generate modes of emancipatory proclamation and liberating praxis that have preceded any formulations of systematic canons, with intellectual surges and imaginative blessings of academic theologians.The traditional Christian doctrines, such as God, Christ, Holy Spirit, Sin, Theodicy, and Ecclesiology, are addressed in the Black theological key. It is evident that the contributors are obviously constrained to pay their respects to the basic themes of classical theological formularies. …