An indispensable study of Christianity in America.
A scholar and commentator raised in the Southern Baptist Church clearly demonstrates “how intractably white supremacy has become embedded in the DNA of American Christianity.”
Growing up amid a religious tradition that believed “chattel slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Jones approaches his subject matter from both a personal and historical perspective. His book—a concise yet comprehensive combination of deeply documented religious history, social science research about contemporary religion, and heartfelt memoir—traces a path that began in the narrow world of Macon, Georgia, and other Jim Crow–infested Southern towns. He received a master of divinity degree from the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, but it wasn’t until he entered the doctorate program at Emory University that he understood “the brutal violence that white Christians deployed to resist black enfranchisement after the Civil War.” As Jones points out, those Christians were not limited to the Baptist faith. The author located race hatred embedded in the doctrines of other Christian churches, including Methodist, Episcopalian, Catholic, and countless other heavily white congregations. Even though he was shocked and disgusted by his discoveries, Jones held back from sharing those disturbing realizations widely, first conducting studies through his work at the organization he founded, the Public Religion Research Institute. Those consistently illuminating studies, mentioned throughout the book, paint a damning portrait. One example: “For all white Christian subgroups,” writes the author, “there is a positive relationship between holding racist attitudes and white Christian identity among both frequent (weekly or more) and infrequent church attenders.” The most hopeful case study focuses on his hometown of Macon, where there are efforts between white and black Baptist churches to pull together. As Jones has sought various paths out of the morass, he has often turned to the writings of James Baldwin about "the white problem" in U.S. society.
An indispensable study of Christianity in America.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2286-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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