True to Our Native Land is a pioneering commentary on the New Testament that sets biblical interpretation firmly in the context of African American experience and concern. The scholarship is cutting-edge, updated, and expanded in this second edition to be in tune with African American culture, education, and churches. The book calls into question many canons of traditional biblical research and highlights the role of the Bible in African American history, accenting themes of ethnicity, class, slavery, and African heritage as these play a role in Christian Scripture and the Christian odyssey of an emancipated people.
Brian K. Blount is president and professor of New Testament at Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina. His scholarship focuses on the Gospel of Mark, the book of Revelation, cultural hermeneutics, and New Testament ethics. He is the author of Cultural Interpretation: Reorienting New Testament Criticism (1995); Go Preach! Mark's Kingdom Message and the Black Church Today (1998); Then the Whisper Put On Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context (2001); Struggling with Scripture, with Walter Brueggemann and William Placher (2001); Preaching the Gospel of Mark in Two Voices, with Gary W. Charles (2002); Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through an African American Lens (2005); Revelation: A Commentary (2009); and Invasion of the Dead: Preaching Resurrection (2014). With Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, he has coedited Making Room at the Table: An Invitation to Multicultural Worship (2000). Gay L. Byron is professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC. Her scholarship focuses on the origins of Christianity in ancient Ethiopia, cultural and womanist readings of Scripture, and race and ethnicity in early Christian writings. She is the author of Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (2002), coeditor (with Vanessa Lovelace) of Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (2016), and coeditor (with Hugh R. Page Jr.) of Black Scholars Matter: Visions, Struggles, and Hopes in Africana Biblical Studies (2022). Emerson B. Powery is professor of biblical studies and assistant dean of the School of Arts, Culture, and Society at Messiah University, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is general editor of the Westminster Study Bible (Westminster John Knox, forthcoming). He is the author of The Good Samaritan: Luke 10 for the Life of the Church (Baker, 2022); Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved, with Rodney Sadler (Westminster John Knox, 2016); Jesus Reads Scripture (Brill, 2003); and editor of The Spirit and the Mind: Essays in Informed Pentecostalism (UPA, 2000).
