In The Golden Band: African American Spirituals and the Hermeneutics of World, Asante Todd offers a theologically generative study of the antebellum Spirituals that is both historically attentive and constructively ambitious. Drawing together African American religious studies, political theology and musical aesthetics, Todd advances what he names a ‘theomusicology’ grounded in the compositional and performative textures of enslaved song. Todd argues that the Spirituals function as a distinctive hermeneutics of the world, offering an interpretive framework through which enslaved communities made theological sense of reality, challenged the prevailing logics of sovereignty that structured antebellum society and imagined alternative ways of inhabiting the world under divine authority.

The book unfolds with notable conceptual coherence, moving from an analysis of sovereignty to a theological reading of musical form. In Part One, Todd situates the antebellum songs within what he terms the ‘cultural logic of sovereignty’, reading the United States through the intertwined lenses of law, property, empire and mastery. Against this backdrop, the Spirituals emerge as counter-sovereign practices that disrupt the claims of the global LeviathanFootnote ¹ and relocate ultimate authority in divine judgement and promise. Part Two furthers this argument by engaging African American religious thought and resisting the sacred and secular bifurcation characteristic of much western theology. Here, Todd presents the Spirituals as operating within a sacramental ontology in which divine presence suffuses land, labour, river and sky, and in which sacred time gathers biblical memory and eschatological hope into lived experience. In Part Three, Todd’s theomusicological method comes into full view. Musical forms such as ring shout, call and response, ostinato and polyrhythm are treated as theological carriers. These aesthetic structures disclose a relational ontology and a grammar of reciprocity in which identity is formed through mutual address rather than isolated autonomy. Repetition signifies divine constancy even within rupture, while improvisation gestures toward freedom within constraint. The Golden Band itself functions as a symbol of communal and eschatological binding, gathering saints, ancestors, angels and the enslaved into a moral and cosmic communion. Through sustained readings of Jordan River imagery, wilderness motifs and the chariot’s motion, Todd demonstrates that musical form and theological imagination are inseparable.

His attention to geography is especially compelling. In his final chapter, ‘Roll, Jordan, Roll’, Todd develops what he calls a ‘theomusicological geography’, in which river, field, mill and wilderness become charged theological terrains. The Jordan is at once a literal waterway, a metaphor of crossing, and a cosmological threshold. The wilderness signifies both peril and encounter. The chariot operates as a vehicle of deliverance and a sign of grace-driven motion. In these readings, nature is a living arena in which divine action and human longing intersect. Todd’s interpretive range here is impressive, drawing from musicology, phenomenology and African American studies to articulate a persuasive theological vision.

The Golden Band is a welcome and necessary intervention. It treats Black musical practice as a primary source for theology and takes the intellectual and spiritual labour of enslaved communities seriously. In doing so, Todd contributes meaningfully to systematic and constructive theology, reminding readers that doctrine is not confined to creeds and councils but can be sung in fields and whispered in hush harbours. At the same time, the book invites further expansion. While Todd attends carefully to communal formation and embodied practice, the gendered textures of that embodiment remain comparatively underexplored. Enslaved women were central to the creation and transmission of the Spirituals. They were theological agents whose bodies bore the burdens of labour, reproduction, sexual violence, and ritual leadership. A more sustained engagement with their embodied experiences alongside attention to domestic liturgies and the ritual economies of care that shaped everyday life could further illuminate the worlds these songs imagine and press the argument toward an even fuller reckoning with lived reality. In addition, while Todd’s musical analysis is illuminating, there remains space to linger more fully in liturgical performance as lived practice. The ring shout is treated as cosmological sign and communal structure, yet its sensorial dimensions are only briefly evoked. Expanding the theomusicological method to attend more explicitly to the body’s ritual knowledge would deepen an already compelling account.

These observations function as an invitation rather than a corrective. Todd has laid substantial groundwork for ongoing theological engagement with the Spirituals, modelling an interdisciplinary rigour that is analytically sharp and spiritually attuned. He challenges theologians to listen differently and to hear sovereignty unsettled by grace through the recognition of slave songs as profound hermeneutics of the world. Ultimately, The Golden Band insists that the Spirituals are not relics of a tragic past but enduring theological texts. In honouring that vision, Todd makes a significant and lasting contribution to African American religious studies in the wider theological academy.