James Baldwin's Understanding of God: Overwhelming Desire and Joy, by Josiah Ulysses Young, III, is an important contribution to a growing body of religious and theological scholarship concerned with the life and literary legacy of James Baldwin. James Baldwin's Understanding of God is a 14-chapter book. Each chapter covers moments in a life that lasted 63 years. ... This reviewer highly recommends it. (Ronald B. Neal, Black Theology, Vol. 14, April, 2016)
Young leads readers through a labyrinth of Baldwin's most intimate yet public reflections on the America he knew through a life marked by the tensions between alienation and desire, foreclosure, and yearning. Like the subject of this volume, Young is incisive, somber, candid and loving as he extends Baldwin's vision that 'artists . . . must tell the truth . . . make a confession, and thus surface those dilemmas and secrets that have to do with who we truly are as human beings.' Moreover, he analyzes the virtues underlying such an expensive and fragile vision, associating Baldwin's aesthetic sensibilities with a rare yet desperately needed insight into the sacred. - Dianne M. Stewart, Associate Professor, Religion and African American Studies, Emory University, USA
Offering a rich and insightful study of America's most notable prophetic thinker, James Baldwin's Understanding of God breaks disciplinary boundaries by placing the works of James Arthur Baldwin within the theological contours of Africana religious studies. Young dares to explore the spatial dimensions of what Charles Long calls the 'extrachurch' and argues that it is within the joys and sorrows of black life, the lyricism of the blues, the extemporaneity of jazz, and the sensuality and love of humanity that we find James Baldwin's theology. - Tracey Elaine Hucks, James D. Vail III Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, Davidson College, USA