Updates, Events, and Publications
ALUM PUBLISHES PROPHETIC PERIL
Thomas M. Fuerst, ATS ’10, recently released Prophetic Periol: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century African American Prophetic-Call Narratives. It is a study of the call narrative storytelling tradition centered on four influential Black leaders. Here is the excerpt from Amazon:
Prophecy reimagines the world. It critiques what is and encourages its audience to imagine what could be. All prophecy, therefore, begins with a person willing to reimagine their own situation. In the biblical and African American traditions, this person receives a “call” to prophetic ministry that upends their reality and compels them to change the way things are. Prophetic Peril: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century African American Prophetic-Call Narratives invites readers into the imaginative, subversive, and ethically complicated stories of four nineteenth-century Black figures who received the call to challenge the what is and live into the what could be in the midst of a hard-hearted world.
Focusing on the prophetic-call narratives of Maria Stewart, Nat Turner, Julia Foote, and Richard Allen, author Thomas M. Fuerst offers insight into the unique contributions this tradition makes to American oratory, storytelling, history, ethics, theology, and protest. As Fuerst demonstrates, Turner’s call narrative subverts white, political interests and expands politics to include the resistance rhetoric and witness of those on the margins. Allen’s apologetic narration combines deeply thoughtful Protestant exegesis with a liberation theology shaped by the experience of enslavement, anchoring his rhetorical power in the experience of Black people in the nineteenth century. The call narratives of Stewart and Foote circumvent patriarchy and resist patriarchal interpretations of the Bible through biblical, embodied, dramatic, visionary appeals that sidestep persuasion and demand either acceptance or rejection. Taken together, these case studies reveal how antebellum Black preachers used religious storytelling to resist white, patriarchal oppression and assert their own voices, offering unique insight to our understanding of prophecy and resistance.
To order the book, go to Amazon or the University Press of Mississippi.
ALUM RELEASES NEW VERSION OF 2001 BOOK
David Miller (ATS ’80) recently released another version of The Path and the Peacemakers. He describes this project in his own words:
The violence that innocent people are
suffering in places like Sudan, Ukraine, Congo and the Middle East breaks our hearts. Years ago, innocent people in Peru suffered similar tragedy–and lived to see a better day. Theirs is a story of good winning the battle over evil.
That is why I have released a new version of my 2001 book, The Path and the Peacemakers. Published originally in London, the book chronicles the saga of the Shining Path terrorist war that ravaged Peru during the 1980s and 90s, a war that nearly destroyed the country. That did not happen, experts say, thanks to Peru’s faithful Christians. Followers of Jesus deployed an arsenal of prayer, forgiveness and witness to truth to overcome one of the bloodiest terrorist groups ever to threaten South America.
Take a minute to check out The Path and the Peacemakers: The triumph over terrorism of the church in Peru at Amazon.com. It might well change the way you look at our world today. As one English book reviewer writes: “If you find it hard to believe in the power of the Gospel to transform communities, then read this story.”
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