Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience

by Victor Anderson (Translator)

At least until recently, most African Americans would know what is meant by "the black church" or by "African American religion." But now, Victor Anderson argues, that tradition is undergoing radical change and harbors great ambiguities and unresolved dilemmas. Anderson's new book seeks to provide a pragmatic but principled way forward for African American religion and life. Anderson's work is two-sided: on one hand, he seeks to deconstruct an older, monolithic idea of African American religion as the stereotypical "black church" experience with one relationship to the larger cultural scene. If that picture was ever accurate, it was always partial, he argues. Constructively, Anderson argues that African American religion experience "is fundamentally understood as relational, processive, open, fluid, and irreducible." The tradition is actually an ongoing creative exchange that relates in many ways to its history, religious institutions, and faith communities. In that creative exchange, he argues, we find here and now instances or moments or events that actualize Martin Luther King's notion of the "beloved community." That image, and the flexibility and pragmatism it implies, best captures the legacy and future of African American religion. Anderson offers it here not just as a nostalgic image but also as an ongoing regulative ideal for African American life and religion.

Genres: Theology

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult book dealing with elusive concepts, but ultimately worth effort. If I understand him, Anderson’s core argument is that a constructive African-American theology is better served by the motif of creative exchange than by, say, the motif of liberation, because African-American experience is manifold and often (in ways that Black liberation theologies may have tended to downplay) grotesque, which is to say, deeply ambiguous. As such, it’s a mistake to ontologize or essentialize African-American experience in terms of an unambiguously liberative Blackness. However, its very grotesquery may be a pragmatic condition for the transformation of destructive competition and conflict into new and renewing connection.

[Francis S Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense sand slightly dated by events, but thought provoking

Anderson makes some stunning observations for a pathway to the Beloved community. While brilliant. Subsequent changes in the attitudes toward the LBGTQ community renders some of his observations a little dated;