Forged in the Fiery Furnace is the work of a systematic theologian, Diana Hayes, who narrates the emergence of the distinctive spiritual beliefs and practices of African Americans by emphasizing stories over systematics, and by portraying a characteristic personality in the place of a coherent philosophy. Her account of African American spirituality is told in a sequence of eight chapters covering the following topics: roots of African traditional religion, slavery, conversion, the spirituals, the black church, the civil rights movement, the role of women, and the scholarship of African American male theologians and ethicists. Although some mention is made of Delores Williams, Jacquelyn Grant, Kelly Brown Douglas, Emilie Townes, Shawn Copeland, and other womanist scholars in the penultimate chapter, the final chapter seems to attribute the last word on the subject of African American spirituality to a significantly greater complement of black male scholars, including Walter Fluker, James Evans, Peter Paris, Carlyle Stewart, Cornel West, Gayraud Wilmore, Robert Franklin, and Bryan Massingale. Notwithstanding this curious privileging of black male perspectives, Hayes writes as one who desires to communicate a conversation about the African American experience across the barriers of race, religion, culture, class, and gender. To this end, she relies very heavily upon secondary sources instead of offering fresh discoveries and/or readings of primary source documents. As a result, students and scholars of the field of African American religious studies will perhaps find this text less helpful and engaging than readers who are new to the subject and unfamiliar with African Americans, and their history and culture.
While well suited for undergraduate and graduate libraries and classrooms, this text readily commends itself to general readers who can appreciate accessible accounts of African American religion and spirituality. The selected bibliography gathered at the end serves its purpose well as an abbreviated guide to some of the best and most recent books on black religion and black theology, inclusive of both Protestant and Catholic authors.
The strength of this book is the telling of a complex story of suffering and struggle as a clear and triumphant narrative. By the same token, its key weakness is a tendency to overgeneralize this history and overlook key nuances of thick description in a somewhat tentative appeal to dominant culture audiences too easily wearied and offended by discourses of racism, slavery, and black oppression. For example, in her chapter on the spirituality of black women, Hayes makes a broadly general claim that sounds wonderful but would be virtually impossible to substantiate, if pressed: “All Black women living in the United States today are daughters of Africa who, over a period of almost five hundred years, were perfected as women of God” (138). The corresponding source note is an insufficient explanation for the designation “perfected” of the company of black women from a theological perspective: “meaning that they were made perfect in the eyes of God because of their harsh situations despite the fact that they were seen as less than perfect and even less than human in the eyes of white Americans” (207). Instead, what comes across is a rather halfhearted defense of the humanity of black women that fails, for whatever reasons, to interrogate substantially the dehumanizing gaze of their oppressors.
Forged in the Fiery Furnace offers a timely overview of the religious history of African Americans with focused definitions and descriptions of African American spirituality. Given the current state of racial tensions in the United States and elsewhere, it stands as a helpful resource for increasing racial awareness in general and for promoting cultivation of a faith-based vision of racial reconciliation and justice among both Catholics and Protestants.
