Carol Wayne White’s Black Lives and Sacred Humanity is a major contribution to American religious thought. She deftly constructs a rationale for African American sacred humanism that accomplishes (at least) three important tasks. First, she establishes the compatibility of her notion of sacred humanism with the best of current scientific thought regarding deep relationality in biology and cosmology. Second, she provides a solidly argued alternative to dogmatically theistic assumptions about African American religiosity. Third, White traces an intellectual history of sacred humanism in key American intellectual texts (Du Bois, Cooper, and Baldwin). With narrative grace, White has created a conversation among figures and fields in American religious thought that cannot help but open new avenues of philosophical and theological possibility.---—Laurel Schneider, Chicago Theological Seminary

. . .A brilliant philosophical treatise on alternatives for African American religiosity. . . this book deserves a wide audience. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above.---Choice Reviews

Carol Wayne White is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Bucknell University. She is the author of Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions and The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631–1679): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism.