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NEW BOOK TO EXPLORE THE BIBLE'S IMPACT ON SLAVERY: "The Talking Book" to reflect how African Americans relating to the Bible help them in their historical conditions
Had it not been for the Bible, Callahan argues, it is difficult to imagine how slavery's children would have found the figural language to express their hopes and fears. Though African slaves were largely kept in illiteracy to thwart communication among them and resistance, evangelical Protestant missionaries began to teach them to read the Bible as a prerequisite for eternal salvation. Once they began to take up the texts of the Bible on their own terms, African Americans seized on the biblical themes that spoke to their condition -- Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel.
In the Bible, the Exodus comes first and the Exile later. But in the African-American experience, Callahan explains, the forced Exile from home into bondage came first. The idea of Exodus represents a hope for justice to be found somewhere, sometime in history. Ethiopia is African-Americans' biblical celebration of a glorious African past and the promise of a glorious future for people of African descent. And Emmanuel is Jesus, who in the African-American imagination shines as the Bible's greatest victim of and victor over injustice. Callahan builds his book around these themes, which saturate African-American culture.
In a powerful postscript, Callahan summarizes the present plight of slavery's children: "Such is the present lot of slavery's children in the land of their birth. The electoral process illegally disenfranchises them. Both major political parties regularly neglect them. The criminal justice system unjustly arrests, incarcerates, and executes them. The military disproportionately dispatches them to the front in its many and unjust wars. The executive branch of the federal government refuses to hear them, the judiciary branch refuses to protect them, and the legislative branch refuses to represent them...A century and a half after the fall of the slave regime, the heirs to ill-gotten gains still rule the United States as did their forebears -- with scripture and injustice." In our troubled times, might the Bible, Callahan asks, once again become a rallying point for slavery's children?
The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible will be priced at $30.00 hardcover.
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