Abstract

In Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism, Carol Wayne White sets out to develop a new religious ideal for African American culture by bringing two unlikely partners, African American religiosity and religious naturalism, into conversation. This is an ambitious project given the prominent role that supernaturalistic theism plays in African American religiosity and the paucity of attention that contemporary religious naturalism has given to cultural issues such as race. She attempts to bridge the two through the concept of “sacred humanity,” a radical version of religious humanism, which, she argues, is foreshadowed in African American religious tradition on the one hand...