Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience by M. Shawn Copeland (review)

Today's current political and racial divisiveness sheds light on the Black experience and the ways that Black people have encountered oppression and suffered under the weight of white supremacy. How Black people survived amid such horrors as enslavement, lynching, police brutality, and killings, and the continuing systematic racism within society, church, and academia has been the subject of many recent books. Over ten years ago came the publication of M. Shawn's Copeland ground-breaking contribution to womanist thought and theology entitled Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. In that book, Copeland looked at the experience of Black women and developed her own theological anthropology which centered the Black experience. Since that time, Copeland has received honors from theological associations, the academy, and literary circles which have acknowledged the path she has blazed for so many theologians and scholars of spirituality, theology, and womanist thought.

Copeland has now turned her gaze in eloquent prose to the role of Jesus Christ in the religious and spiritual experience of African Americans in her most recent book entitled Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience. Copeland herself eloquently states, "This book comes from my grappling with the meaning of the cross of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth in relation to the transgenerational and enormous social oppression of African American children youth, women, and men. This book seeks to honor the faith, hope, and love, joy and fortitude and creativity of my ancestors and their mediation of those virtues to the ongoing struggle of Black people to live in justice and freedom and to help forge a nation committed authentically to those virtues."

There is a West African adinkra symbol—SANKOFA—which depicts a bird heading in one direction, but its head is turned backward to retrieve an egg on his back. The definition of the SANKOFA symbol is one of reaching back to move forward. What this means is that one must go back, reach back, and learn and retrieve your history and your traditions to move forward on the journey of life. Copeland's book is an exercise of SANKOFA. Throughout the book she redefines who Jesus is and continues to be for members of the Black community who have been ostracized in so many ways. She also brings to light the pain of those from LGBTQIA communities when she asks the question, "Can Jesus of Nazareth be an option for gay and lesbians and transgender people?" The Black experience and the experience of LGBTQIA persons are threads that run throughout this book.

Divided into three parts, Copeland's writings take a distinct perspective on Black religious experiences in its many forms by highlighting the meaning and the power of the cross of Jesus Christ. Her introductory section lays the groundwork for what she hopes to achieve. It is striking in that she does not begin with stories of her early encounter of racism or understandings of her own identity as a Black person. Rather, she begins by sharing how encounters with anti-Semitism in her early years led to her interest in theology. As a student of theology in her youth, she began to ask how theology might offer a response to suffering and oppression. That question led her to reflect on the Black experience and how the historical, cultural, social, existential experiences of peoples of African descent and their responses to suffering have served as a starting point for Copeland's journey as a theologian. It is the cross and her understandings of the cross that shape the content of this book and shed light onto her understanding of the practical and political nature of theology.

Like James Cone, she states that theology cannot, must not remain silent or complicit before the suffering of a crucified world and the suffering of God's crucified peoples. Reading this book as a theological educator whose focus is the practice of spirituality, I hear...