Prologue, Book Review Editor

Spiritus has come to recognize that there are certain resonant themes arising with urgency in our current historical context that pose poignant questions to spirituality scholars and that demand our guild's greater attention. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic invites us to raise questions about ethical practices of medicine, the limits of freedom and government, practices of neighborliness, and ecclesial worship amid extremity. Further, it has forced us to name the inequities that this virus has laid bare as communities of color and nations in the Global South have disproportionately been negatively affected. The effects of COVID-19 call on spirituality for models, critique, practices, projects, and theologies of action and activism.

In an effort to present literature that more intentionally amplifies the voices of black and brown leaders and thinkers in Christian Spirituality, Spiritus will, periodically, offer book reviews with special focus editions. In this issue, our reviews engage with important texts related to black spirituality. Timothy Robinson and Aizaiah Yong profile three important recent publications that more adequately and thoroughly treat the life and spirituality of Howard Thurman. C. Vanessa White highlights M. Shawn Copeland's Christological shift in her 2018 book on the role of Jesus in African American religious experience. Albert Douglas Honegan presents Dominique Gilliard's reading of key biblical figures as a model of how to leverage privilege to steward social transformation in his most recent monograph, and Ineda Adesanya offers an overview of the second edition of Michael Gomez's seminal history of the African Diaspora. Future issues will review additional books in the areas of womanist ecclesiological experiments, African Christian history, and Hispanic/Latinx spirituality alongside reviews more broadly related to the field of spirituality studies. I invite interested scholars to put forth books for review or to volunteer to review relevant scholarly contributions.