Overview

Manifesting the Primal Imagination explores a little known, but important, aspect of Black American Christianity--the primal spirituality of the Black Pentecostal and spiritual church. Set against the backdrop of a Christianity believed by many to be synonymous with White Western culture, Manifesting the Primal Imagination demonstrates how this image of Christianity came to be, and how it is false, through a historical and scriptural examination of Christianity itself. At a time in which the nature of Christian faith is hotly contested, with many rejecting Christianity on the basis of its historical association with White supremacist claims, Settles advocates for a rereading of the history of Black American faith in a way that recognizes the importance of the primal imagination to Christianity itself.

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9781666738292

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Reviews

""It is rare that one comes upon a book that truly breaks new ground, but this is one such. For it brings together bodies of existing knowledge not hitherto associated with one another in a unique pattern of reflection, shedding new light on old stories and opening up new and redemptive perspectives for a whole range of readers."" --Gillian M. Bediako, editor, Journal of African Christian Thought ""In this work, Joshua Settles revisits the Western hegemony of Christianity from the perspective of the virtual truncation of the primal imagination in the West. He demonstrates how Black American Christianity is primal and thus more biblical than Enlightenment-jaundiced Western Christianity, often informed by white supremacist tendencies. Black American Christianity is thereby freed to make its own legitimate contribution to Christian theology, especially in terms of embodied theology."" --B. Y. Quarshie, immediate past rector, Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture

Author Information

Joshua D. Settles is a Black American scholar and senior research fellow at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture, in Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana.

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