Theology for a Violent Age: Religious Beliefs Crippling African American Youth

Any politician or pundit will agree: we live in a violent and dangerous age. Our pent-up anger and rage fills our households and spills over into our neighborhoods and streets, leaving African American families who live in poverty and with limited capability to ward off shame and self-contempt as its unfortunate victims.

"There are many ideas in this little volume and they are meaningful. They set the stage for an interpretation of certain African American youth and by implication other youth who are similarly situated in American Society."
ARCHIE SMITH, Jr., PhD James and Clarice Foster Professor of Pastoral Psychology and Counseling, Pacific School of Religion

"In attempting to uncover the self-knowledge of African American people as reflected in Black dramatic literature as 'conviction' or secular theology, Woody Carter simultaneously reveals the dominant forces that influence Black life and the critical necessity to 'stand on our own (African) cultural ground.' All Black thinkers, from intellectuals and scholars to teachers, preachers and parents to mental health workers, futurist and community activist, who have struggled with the dilemma of DuBois's double consciousness and the significance of religion in the Black community, both of which I believe have never been properly understood, will find Theology for a Violent Age informative, insightful, and a strong provocation and challenge for the reader to continue to seek the core essence of being Black and the searchlights necessary to envision our full humanity as more than reactions to white supremacy and racial domination and oppression. Theology for a Violent Age is deserving of a critical read and methodical application against the problems of our time."
DR. WADE W. NOBLES Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State University; Executive Director, The Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life & Culture; Co-Founder and Past President, Association of Black Psychologists and author of Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational Readings in African Psychology, Third World Press. Chicago, 2009