Encouragement: An Introduction to Black Theopoetics

Originating within the theological academy, theopoetics is a theological discourse that foregrounds imagination and creativity as hermeneutical routes towards divine insight. Its downside is its primary alignment with a White, male-centered, academy-bred worldview. Persons of Black African descent, however, do theopoetics differently. Rooted in their identities and cultures, their theopoetics is called Black Theopoetics. Black Theopoetics sees the world – feels and experiences the world – through the particular details of one's Blackness. Rooted in Black, African-descended experience and imagination, it relies on Black forebearers’ and contemporaries’ honest, critical examination and challenging of conventional and antiquated dominant theological ideologies. It is a Black-centered inventive creative theological endeavor that opens the imagination to more expansive ways of recognizing the layers and contours of the world in which one lives and how the divine interacts in such.