Identifying African American religiosity as the ingenuity of a people constantly striving to inhabit their humanity and eke out a meaningful existence for themselves amid harrowing circumstances, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity constructs a concept of sacred humanity and grounds it in the writings of Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. Supported by current theories in science studies, critical theory, and religious naturalism, this concept, as Carol Wayne White demonstrates, offers a capacious view of humans as interconnected, social, value-laden organisms with the capacity to transform themselves and create nobler worlds wherein all sentient creatures flourish. Acknowledging the great harm wrought by divisive and problematic racial constructions in the United States, this book offers an alternative to theistic models of African American religiosity to inspire newer, conceptually compelling views of spirituality that address a classic, perennial religious question: What does it mean to be fully human and fully alive? Carol Wayne White’s Black Lives and Sacred Humanity is a major contribution to American religious thought. She deftly constructs a rationale for African American sacred humanism that accomplishes (at least) three important tasks. First, she establishes the compatibility of her notion of sacred humanism with the best of current scientific thought regarding deep relationality in biology and cosmology. Second, she provides a solidly argued alternative to dogmatically theistic assumptions about African American religiosity. Third, White traces an intellectual history of sacred humanism in key American intellectual texts (Du Bois, Cooper, and Baldwin). With narrative grace, White has created a conversation among figures and fields in American religious thought that cannot help but open new avenues of philosophical and theological possibility. ---―Laurel Schneider, Chicago Theological Seminary . . .A brilliant philosophical treatise on alternatives for African American religiosity. . . this book deserves a wide audience. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. ---Choice Reviews Carol Wayne White’s Black Lives and Sacred Humanity is a major contribution to American religious thought. She deftly constructs a rationale for African American sacred humanism that accomplishes (at least) three important tasks. First, she establishes the compatibility of her notion of sacred humanism with the best of current scientific thought regarding deep relationality in biology and cosmology. Second, she provides a solidly argued alternative to dogmatically theistic assumptions about African American religiosity. Third, White traces an intellectual history of sacred humanism in key American intellectual texts (Du Bois, Cooper, and Baldwin). With narrative grace, White has created a conversation among figures and fields in American religious thought that cannot help but open new avenues of philosophical and theological possibility. ---―Laurel Schneider, Chicago Theological Seminary Carol Wayne White is Presidential Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Bucknell University. Her books include Poststructuralism, Feminism, and Religion: Triangulating Positions (Humanities, 2002); The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631-70): Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism (SUNY Press, 2009); and Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (Fordham University Press, 2016), which won a Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Titles. White has published many essays on the creative intersections of critical theory and religion, process philosophy, science and religion, and religious naturalism; her work has also appeared in Zygon: The Journal of Religion and Science , The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy , Philosophia Africana , and Religion & Public Life . White is currently finishing a book manuscript exploring a trajectory of modernist racial discourse that intimately conjoined White supremacy and speciesism in promoting views of Black animality and doing research for a new book project that explores the insights of religious naturalism expressed in contemporary North American nature poets and writers.