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  • Revives My Soul Again: The Spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr. ed. by Lewis V. Baldwin and Victor Anderson
  • Edgar "Trey" Clark III (bio)
Revives My Soul Again: The Spirituality of Martin Luther King Jr. Edited by Lewis V. Baldwin and Victor Anderson. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2018. 307 pp. $29.00 pbk./$26.00 eb.

Martin Luther King Jr. is widely recognized as a notable civil rights leader, preacher, and minister. However, notwithstanding the important works of Lewis V. Baldwin, Frederick L. Downing, and Stewart Burns, there is a surprising scarcity of literature that offers a detailed and nuanced study of the spirituality that undergirded his life and leadership. Baldwin and Victor Anderson, two distinguished scholars of African American religion, offer a much-needed correction to this neglect in their edited volume Revives My Soul Again. The title of the book comes from a hymn, "Balm in Gilead," that King quoted as he spoke of how the Holy Spirit revived his soul in moments of discouragement in his struggle for justice. Drawing together illuminating essays from a range of established and emerging scholars, Revives My Soul Again offers a substantive interdisciplinary study of King's "deep, vital, engaging, and contagious spirituality" (1). Unlike Diana Butler Bass and others, the editors of this volume suggest that spirituality and religion should be understood as words that "cross-pollinate in terms of their meanings" (4). They show that this comports with King's own practice of treating religious experience and spirituality as synonymous. As such, the book aims to demonstrate that King's religious background, personal practices, public leadership, and writings reveal a holistic spirituality that may prove instructive given the myriad spiritual and ethical challenges of the contemporary world.

Among the many topics that are covered in the book's eleven essays, I would like to focus on three important, interrelated themes. One of the central themes in the work pertains to the African and African American roots of King's spirituality. In her essay, Diana L. Hayes argues that King's spirituality was a uniquely African American spirituality. Specifically, she claims that King's upbringing in the black church in the segregated South introduced him to holistic, communal Africana religious and spiritual traditions that were "forged in the fiery furnace" of enslavement (43). Lewis Baldwin furthers a focus on the importance of King's African American roots with his essay on King's prayer life. Baldwin persuasively demonstrates that King maintained a life of prayer that encompassed God, self, and neighbor. One critical way that King's inclusive approach to prayer manifested publicly was his popularization of "the prayer circle" during the civil rights movement, a tradition that found its roots among his enslaved forebearers (166). Of course, the black church's influence on King is perhaps most commonly recognized in his preaching. Mervyn Warren helpfully explores this in his fine essay on the spirituality of King's preaching.

Another key theme pertains to the robust philosophical and theological dimensions of King's spirituality. In an intriguing essay, Victor Anderson considers "the affective dynamics of King's religious experience" in conversation with two different thinkers: William James and Jonathan Edwards (19). Anderson shows how James and Edwards provide helpful framing for understanding how the motivational structures of doubt and assurance manifest in two difficult episodes of King's spiritual life. In another chapter, Baldwin and Anderson probe deeply into the phenomenon of the "spiritual" in King's life and thought. Essentially, they argue [End Page 164] that King tended to relate the "spiritual" to "the whole of life, existence, and the universe" (62). In his essay, Aaron J. Howard brings attention to one of the most neglected theological aspects of King scholarship: the Holy Spirit. He avers that King evinced an understanding of the Holy Spirit that validated the existence of a benevolent and immanent God and energized sociopolitical engagement (93). The lived dimensions of King's theology are fleshed out more explicitly in an essay by Stewart Burns. Burns argues that King's understanding of the black social Gospel and personalist philosophy assumed a new form as a result of the suffering he experienced in his last...

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