Recalibrating Life: Race, Identity, & Healing in Black Religious Experience

Team Members/Contributors

Derek Hicks Lancaster Theological Seminary Contact Me

About this first book grant for scholars of color

Recalibrating Life uncovers notions of healing and a desire for wholeness within African American Christian experience as seen in the struggle to transform social reality. This study challenges the dominant assumption that black Christianity is governed primarily by a theological focus on corporate liberation. Accordingly, it exposes a deep concern with healing—in relation to bodily, political, spiritual, and social restoration—as a theological thrust fueling black Christianity. I reveal this concern through an interrogation of the bio-political and socio-political significance and consequences of chattel slavery in the United States. The theme of healing and identity (re)formation manifests itself within various aspects of religious life and activity—among them are ritual and worship, aesthetic presentation, adornment, Scriptural interpretation, and general resistance to racial oppression. I argue that such practices are in consequence therapeutic, in that social and political imagination is curatively recalibrated in ways more suitable for a healthy existence. I mark these practices as a particular style of religious life and therefore a way of understanding the nature of black Christian experience.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition 2012 Book Derek Hicks