Keeping the Faith: African-American Sermons of Liberation [With CDROM]

""The successful African American preacher is a singing poet,"" writes Maya Angelou in the introduction to James Haskins's notable collection Keeping the Faith: African American Sermons of Liberation. In it, Gardner Taylor muses on the constancy of change, Martin Luther King calls Christians to become ""transformed nonconformists,"" and Katie Cannon draws on the Book of Numbers to persuade Christians that they are more than mere grasshoppers in a land of giants. The collection also includes a historic 1808 sermon by Methodist leader Absalom Jones, in which he compares the situation of chattel slavery in 19th-century America to the enslavement of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt. The anthology is accompanied by a CD of 10 sermons, several of which are not in the book, to give readers a flavor of the oral impact of African-American preaching. (June)