Black Liturgies Av Cole Arthur Riley

<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • A collection of prayer, poetry, and spiritual practice centering the Black interior world, from the author of <i>This Here Flesh</i> and creator of Black Liturgies</b><br><b> </b><br><b>“A true spiritual balm for our troubled times.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of <i>What Truth Sounds Like</i></b><br><br>For years, Cole Arthur Riley was desperate for a spirituality she could trust. Amid ongoing national racial violence, the isolation of the pandemic, and a surge of anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, she began dreaming of a more human, more liberating expression of faith. She went on to create Black Liturgies, a digital project that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body.<br><br>In this book, she brings together hundreds of new prayers, along with letters, poems, meditation questions, breath practices, scriptures, and the writings of Black literary ancestors to offer forty-three liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community. Inviting readers to reflect on their shared experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair, and creating rituals for holidays like Lent and Juneteenth, Arthur Riley writes with a poet’s touch and a sensitivity that has made her one of the most important spiritual voices at work today.<br><br>For anyone healing from communities that were more violent than loving; for anyone who has escaped the trauma of white Christian nationalism, religious homophobia, or transphobia; for anyone asking what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and terror, <i>Black Liturgies</i> is a work of healing and empowerment, and a vision for what might be.