"The successful African American preacher is a singing poet," writes Maya Angelou in the introduction to James Haskins's notable collection Keeping the Faith: African American Sermons of Liberation. In it, Gardner Taylor muses on the constancy of change, Martin Luther King calls Christians to become "transformed nonconformists," and Katie Cannon draws on the Book of Numbers to persuade Christians that they are more than mere grasshoppers in a land of giants. The collection also includes a historic 1808 sermon by Methodist leader Absalom Jones, in which he compares the situation of chattel slavery in 19th-century America to the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt. The anthology is accompanied by a CD of 10 sermons, several of which are not in the book, to give readers a flavor of the oral impact of African-American preaching.
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From Booklist
Perhaps this collection will be most helpful to those who aren't already familiar with the African American preaching tradition. Reading these sermons is akin to reading plays, and the CD of audio recordings slated to accompany the book should prove indispensable in evoking them as performances as well as texts, demonstrating that they weren't composed for solitary reading. The historical breadth the collection presents, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, is impressive, and so is the sermons' denominational range. Editor Haskins also exposes a range of styles, from scholarly analyses of hymnody to political oratory and liberation theology to exuberant outbursts of praise and thanksgiving, all of which testifies to the great versatility of African American preachers and scholars as it convincingly supports Haskins' prefatory claim that "African American preachers . . . are cultural and social historians, repositories of traditions reaching back into the past and across oceans, and leaders in protesting the inequities and tribulations of life." To that, the congregation this collection gathers is sure to say "Amen." Steven Schroeder
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