The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans

by Almeda Wright

How do young African Americans approach their faith in God when continued violence and police brutality batters the news each day? In The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans , Almeda M. Wright argues that African American youth separate their everyday lives and their spirituality into mutually exclusive categories. This results in a noticeable division between their experiences of systemic injustices and their religious beliefs and practices. Yet Wright suggests that youth can and do teach the church and society myriad lessons through their theological reflections and actions. Giving special attention to the resources of African American religious and theological traditions, Wright creates a critical pedagogy for integrating spirituality into the lives of African American youth, as well as confronting and navigating spiritual fragmentation and systemic injustice.

352 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 2017

Reviews

[Daniel Mcgregor · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very disappointing book. Since the author is from Yale, I expected the typical liberal theological troupes. At times these liberal biases rise above being mere announces to being real distractions that push something other than the historical Christian faith as the advocated solution to her fractured spirituality she tries to describe through out the book. In the end her vision of what African-American youth need in order to have an integrated theology seems far to narrow in scope. She simply argues that African-American youth need to reconnect with the African-American church. But is this argument not missing the larger need of the entire American Church (white or black) to reconnect with it's pre-enlightenment origins and the coherent narrative it represents? This book left me wishing more from her project.