Acquire Conversations With God: Two Centuries Of Prayers By African Americans Crafted By James Melvin Washington Issued As Textbook

to stand as a major contribution to AfricanAmerican literature, this stirring collection of more thanprayers portrays the spectra of human emotion.
Some of the prayers have famous authors, from W, E. B. DuBois to Alice Walker, while many are of anonymous origin, passed down from generation to generation, Hopeful, discouraging, faithbuilding, heavy, worth reading,

from the afterward: "Lord, the search for two centuries of the prayers of our forebears offers a profile of the trials, defeats, and triumphs of often unheralded martyrdom.
. . Has the sense that prayer is a signal way to rally our tempestuous selves around the anchorage of your incomparable love been lost.
. . O God, God, I pray that you will bless us with a might increase in the gift of prayer in every culture, race, and nation on this abused planet.
" Deep. This book is incredible, an allround educationspiritually, historically, culturally, and judicially, "Prayer a judicial education" Yes in his penetrating introduction, Washington says this: "Prayer in the midst of the abortion of one's human, political, and social rights is an act of justice education insofar as it reminds the one who prays, and the one who overhears it, that the one praying is a child of God" xxxiv.
In the face of calls to assimilation and "the emasculation of their culture and history," prayer then "becomes the primal way of conducting 'justice education'" xlvi.


The book is a profound work of scholarship by a giantmore people need to know about James Melvin Washington! Consider this tribute to Washington, with contributors like Cornell West, Albert Raboteau, James Cone, Richard Newman, and others: sitelinkThe Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption.
Be sure to see Washington's sitelinkFrustrated Fellowship: The Black Quest for Social Power,

But back to this book on prayer, This book is like an entry into the holy of holies, into the faith of those who believed, or struggled to believe, in God in the face of centuries of suffering and injustice.
Powerful, moving, heartwrenching, profound.

I'm so glad I found this book, An excellent collection of prayers over several centuries, It causes you to think about the prayers said by individuals who were living in different times of our nation's history, I truly enjoyed this book and learned a few things about me and my relationship with God, Amen. Conversations with God now in its twentieth anniversary edition is a collection of prayers by African Americans that, as author James Washington states, “reflect the central crisis out of which and to which these prayers come.
” This book covers two centuries of African American history from slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction to Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the postmodern African American world of thes ands.


James Washingtons epic anthology includes a wide range of contributors who include musicians, writers, spiritual leaders, community organizers, scholars, educators, abolitionists, and most importantly, fugitive slaves.
While each visceral prayer varies one from the other depending on the circumstances and time periods, they are joined together by one common thread: a heartfelt cry for freedom and justice from a people whose generational history has been and continues to be marred by racial persecution.
Although Washington did not live to see the reprinting of his project, this collection would not have come to fruition if it were not for the painstaking archival research that he embraced as a work of love.
Unquestionably, Conversations with God is a must read by all, both at home and in the classroom,
Originally posted on San Francisco Book ,
Anita Lock, Book er James Melvin Washington, Ph, D. was Professor of Church

History at Union Theological Seminary and Adjunct Professor of Religion at Columbia University, .