“Black Life Matter is a powerful and moving book, a challenge and a rejoinder to white Western philosophy, a deep thinking from black and flesh. This book becomes more urgent and more necessary with each passing day.” - Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
“Over the last three decades, there has been a kind of unspoken rift between black religion and black studies. In this powerful book, Biko Mandela Gray strongly contributes to bridging that gap, exemplifying recent interest in Black Lives Matter and black religion. Black Life Matter is timely and thought provoking.” - Joseph R. Winters, author of Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress
“[Black Life Matter] is an incredible work examining the lost lives of four key figures in thepost-modern Civil Rights Movement, also known as Black Lives Matter. . . . Mandela Gray does an amazing job at demonstrating, and never forgetting, the recent atrocities and injustices of our culture.”
- Josh Barker,
Amsterdam News
“Black Life Matter is a wonderful book that explores the meaning of Black bodies and their corporality as living matter. . . . This book works as an instrument to mourn, honour, and actively remember not only the lives and death of the four victims described in each of the chapters but any other Black life that has been stolen.” - Felipe Agudelo, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"Gray’s courageous take on offering theory and religious attentiveness to Blackness and Black lives creates a space where Ayana, Tamir, Alton, Sandra and so many others can be honored for the fullness of who they were to their families and to this world—and not only be reduced to what happened to them on this plane. . . . Black Life Matter is an everlasting reminder that Blackness bears infinity within it and no matter what or who tries to terminate it, Blackness essences eternity. It cannot be captured. It will not end." - Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, Reading Religion
"Gray’s work, through the attentive comfort and defense of those who are “already dead, those dying, and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always imminent death,” will remain ever relevant (5)." - David Latimore, Homiletic
"Black Life Matter is an important work that many intellectual historians should try to grapple with. At the least, it asks us to think deeply about how important Blackness—in the numerous forms it has taken in American and global history—has been to the broad project of Western thought. Perhaps more importantly, it asks us to also take Black people seriously, as subjects of inquiry, study, and, quite simply, as people, struggling along in society like anyone and everyone else." - Robert Greene II, Society for U.S. Intellectual History
