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Wrestling with a Wounding Word: Reading the Disjointed Lines of African American Spirituality
Author(s) -
Jennings Willie James
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
modern theology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.144
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1468-0025
pISSN - 0266-7177
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0025.00035
Subject(s) - spirituality , christianity , articulation (sociology) , reading (process) , power (physics) , philosophy , essentialism , african american , alterity , aesthetics , religious studies , literature , epistemology , sociology , ethnology , linguistics , art , political science , law , medicine , physics , alternative medicine , pathology , quantum mechanics , politics
This essay examines African American spirituality as a complex web of arguments constituted by and shaped around a struggle with Christianity. With these arguments, this essay examines the dominant way in which Afro‐American spirituality is defined, along the lines of an essential African reality. This definition is shown to be a part of the struggle against Christianity. The positing of this essentialist definition is also a form of spiritual practice which points to a deep longing for freedom from the continuing power of the colonialist’s theologically derogatory vision of the African. However the effect of this definition is to render all Christian articulation and expression of the African transparent, pointing always and only to their blackness. Thus Afro‐spirituality as it is commonly articulated re‐establishes the colonialist vision of the African as always presenting a theological alterity, an inauthentic Christian.