In a speech given to students at Grosse Pointe High School on March 14, 1968, just three weeks before his death, Martin Luther King addressed the uprisings that consumed America during this time. During the same time that King delivered this speech, plans were underway for a retreat that would have brought King together with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. While we will never know what both men would have talked about or what they would have done, I do believe—at least in so far as King is concerned—that he would have undoubtedly spoken about his concept of the Beloved Community.

In this article, we trace arguments for the sacredness of Black life from Sojourner Truth to the Combahee River Collective to the founders of Black Lives Matter, arguing that Black women have consistently drawn on sacred and ritual structures to argue not just that Black life matters but also that Black life has inherent value. As such, we conclude with reflections on Black feminist ethics as an extension of the doctrine of imago dei.

One of the places where there is an assumed manifestation of the Beloved Community is the Black church. However, church hurt is a phenomenon that has plagued the Black community. Marginalization, isolation, and even the adoption of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude have been inferred habits and practices for Black congregants whose sexual lifestyle, mental stability, or sexual or emotional trauma may not fit neatly into the church doctrine. The inability to fit neatly within the doctrinal norms leaves many members of the Black community feeling abandoned spiritually and in a desperate search for belonging and acceptance. Using Black liberation theology, womanist thought, autoethnography, and Afrocentricity as a metatheory, this article seeks to discuss the impact of liberationist ideology and womanist ethics within the practices of an Afrocentric rite of passage community based in Atlanta, Georgia, with a satellite branch in New York, New York.

In an era of #BlackLivesMatter, more attention has been given to the historically disproportionate level of state-sanctioned violence against Black men, along with the health disparities and the corresponding higher mortality rates that impact them and the Black community. In response to these socio-political inequalities brought to the forefront by the COVID-19 pandemic, protests, speeches, and rallies convened around the country. Yet, there is still a need for an intervention that creates a communal culture of sacred space for Black men. This article reports on a case study examining Jazz for Prostate Cancer Awareness, which used a womanist frame for religious health education. Womanism aims to liberate the entire being, including the mind, the body, and the soul, of Black women (and men), which works well as an intervention and an alternative to the status quo public health education strategies.

This article will analyze the social justice activism of Bree Newsome through a womanist rhetorical lens. More specifically, it will look at the symbolic action of removing the Confederate flag from the state Capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina, which initiated the rhetorical crisis of her anti-Confederate flag movement because it confronted racism, hatred, slavery, lynching, and White supremacy. The task of this womanist critique is to expand our understanding of the redemptive self-love tenet displayed through Newsome’s activism that allows an individual to fight for the social justice of others and grants the redemptive opportunity for the activist to either build or build upon the legacy of the deceased/abused person(s).

Viewing Black pain for pleasure and entertainment has not only been held in high regard from the inception of this country but has also recently been infused into communal consumption of Black death on social media. This malevolently charged discursive reality makes the creation of safe embodied religious space a persistent challenge for Black women and men of faith. However, technology also serves as an aid to push forth subversive and supportive digital communities and congregations. Here, the Beloved Community is transformed, and collective liberation again becomes a theological imperative. In this article, I analyze the Pink Robe Chronicles as a digital hush harbor. Considering this space as a womanist rhetorical imaginary that redefines kinship and renegotiates discursive boundaries, I explore how its curator hallowedly holds the precarity of Black pain and juxtaposes it with the power and promise of a deliberately Afrocentric ethic to speak wholeness to those connected by its teleological imperative.