The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Identity

Greg Garrett. Orbis, $24 (192p) ISBN 978-162698-539-1

In this introspective outing, Garrett (Entertaining Judgment), an English professor at Baylor University, frames James Baldwin (1924–1987) as a kind of “prophet of humanity,” who offered penetrating commentary on America’s failures while envisioning a more loving future. As a cultural critic, for example, Baldwin interrogated the racial, religious, and sexual stereotypes embedded in such books and films as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), in which Black physician Dr. John Wade Prentice (played by Sidney Poitier) serves as “not so much a character as a function, a myth created to make white audiences able to accept the interracial romance that drives the story,” writes Garrett. And while Baldwin “officially left the church” in his teens, Garrett believes “the spark of Jesus within [him]... never went out”; Baldwin himself noted in an 1963 interview: “Every artist is fundamentally religious .... I haven’t been in a church for twenty years. Nevertheless, when [William] Blake talks about the New Jerusalem, I believe.” This undercurrent of faith is evidenced, according to Garrett, by Baldwin’s vision of the Christian concept of “The Welcome

Table, a place where all would be respected, loved, seen, known, and fed” in an unfinished play of the same name. Ultimately, Garrett hopes that readers, when confronted by Baldwin’s critical perspectives on race, justice, and faith, will grapple with America’s past and “stand up and say what is wrong—and what is right.” This thought-provoking work casts a literary giant in a new light. (Sept.)