Mtoto House

How can parents, educators, and clergy work together for the quality of lives for African American children? Mtoto House: Vision to Victory addresses this question by presenting the theories and practices of a faith-based institution called Mtoto House, the "Children's Community." The history and rituals of this institution along with the voices of children and adults are presented in a readable style. This book also provides a discussion of analyses and implications for parents, educators, and clergy.

Teaching to Live explores the connections between religion, education, and struggles for freedom within African American communities throughout the twentieth century by examining the lives of African American activist-educators. Almeda M. Wright interrogates how religion inspired them to educate in radical and transformative ways and invites readers to continue exploring how these concepts will evolve for future generations of activist-educators.

In this collection, black religious scholars and pastors whose expertise range from theology, ethics, and the psychology of religion, to preaching, religious aesthetics, and religious education, discuss the legacy of Albert B. Cleage Jr. and the idea of the Black Madonna and child. Easter Sunday, 2017 will mark the fifty year anniversary of Albert B. Cleage Jr.’s unveiling of a mural of the Black Madonna and child in his church in Detroit, Michigan. This unveiling symbolized a radical theological departure and disruption. The mural helped symbolically launch Black Christian Nationalism and influenced the Black Power movement in the United States. But fifty years later, what has been the lasting impact of this act of theological innovation? What is the legacy of Cleage’s emphasis on the literal blackness of Jesus? How has the idea of a Black Madonna and child informed notions of black womanhood, motherhood? LGBTQ communities? How has Cleage’s theology influenced Christian education, Africana pastoral theology, and the Black Arts Movement? The contributors to this work discuss answers to these and many more questions.

These days are filled with social unrest. Lack of compassion from elected officials, police brutality, unjust laws that create poverty through minimal wages but soaring profits for capitalists, benign neglect of blighted neighborhoods, and crime within the cities and in governments create a landscape of oppression that directly diminishes the quality of life, especially for African Americans. What is the role of the Black church and Black Christians in light of these realities? Just to save souls is not enough! Memoir of a Black Christian Nationalist: Seeds of Liberation is a poignant personal story of the author’s thirty-year experience of being a Black Christian Nationalist. The theological framework, program, and organization re-establishing the Black church’s relevancy to the liberation struggle are eloquently and informatively interwoven in . . . * The DNA Research about the Race of Jesus * The Powerful Leadership of Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr., Founder of the Shrines of the Black Madonna * The Transformation of Black People * The Seeds of Liberation—Answers for the Black Church * Practices That Create Freedom, Power, and a More Humane World

This new edition of "Syntax: A functional-typological introduction" is at many points radically revised. In the previous edition (1984) the author deliberately chose to de-emphasize the more formal aspects of syntactic structure, in favor of a more comprehensive treatment of the semantic and pragmatic correlates of syntactic structure. With hindsight the author now finds the de-emphasis of the formal properties a somewhat regrettable choice, since it creates the false impression that one could somehow be a functionalist without being at the same time a structuralist. To redress the balance, explicit treatment is given to the core formal properties of syntactic constructions, such as constituency and hierarchy (phrase structure), grammatical relations and relational control, clause union, finiteness and governed constructions. At the same time, the cognitive and communicative underpinning of grammatical universals are further elucidated and underscored, and the interplay between grammar, cognition and neurology is outlined. Also the relevant typological database is expanded, now exploring in greater precision the bounds of syntactic diversity. Lastly, Syntax treats synchronic-typological diversity more explicitly as the dynamic by-product of diachronic development or grammaticalization. In so doing a parallel is drawn between linguistic diversity and diachrony on the one hand and biological diversity and evolution on the other. It is then suggested that as in biology synchronic universals of grammar are exercised and instantiated primarily as constraints on development, and are thus merely the apparent by-products of universal constraints on grammaticalization.

"Malcolm X asked: Does Christianity have nothing more to offer than spiritual "novocaine," enabling Black Americans to suffer peacefully?"--

In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories. With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.