The Wounds Are the Witness by Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, serves as devotional reading, a summons to self-care, and encouragement for everyday action and outspokenness. Dr. Pierce will appear at the 2025 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, October 18-19.
White Property, Black Trespass by Nashville scholar and activist Andrew Krinks examines mass incarceration and racial hierarchies through a spiritual lens, with a perspective rooted in the belief that “there is life beyond the present order of exploitation, dispossession, and death.”
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: Prathia Hall was a minister, activist, and academic who played a critical but largely unknown role in the civil rights movement. Memphis church historian Courtney Pace recounts her pivotal influence in Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall.
In Reorganized Religion, journalist Bob Smietana examines the evolution of America’s Christian institutions.
In a new young readers edition, Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir The Sun Does Shine shares his story of wrongful imprisonment and triumph over injustice. Hinton will appear at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on September 22 and at Belmont University in Nashville on September 25.
“If fundamentalism had not existed,” Barry Hankins tells us, J. Frank Norris “would have invented it.” In God’s Rascal, Hankins offers a portrait of a talented, abusive man whose fiery rhetoric shaped a major U.S. religious movement.
