What are you reading?

[dark_crystal]

Originally Posted by dark_crystal

With eyes:

Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.

With Ears:

Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang "Amazing Grace" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past.

HOMEGOING was great. An interesting theme is the lingering inter-tribe shaming among West African nations who cooperated with the Britsh slavers. Also the horror those nations felt at how the slaves they sold were treated in America-- these nations practiced slavery, but did not brutalize or dehumanize their slaves, who were usually the spoils of battle. They assumed that the white men they sold their slaves to would treat them with the same dignity.

RECONSTRUCTING THE GOSPEL did not have much in it that was new to me, or that would be new to anyone who has read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. I did learn about Thornton Stringfellow, the minister who wrote SCRIPTURAL AND STATISTICAL VIEWS IN FAVOR OF SLAVERY, and the Colfax Massacre, "the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era."