Books

Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World –And How To Repair It All (Brazos, 2022)

"Extraordinary. . . . Let this story of family, race, and resistance create anger in your spirit and ultimately inspire your heart to join the work to heal our nation and eventually our world."--Otis Moss III (from the foreword)

Drawing on her lifelong journey to know her family's history, leading Christian activist Lisa Sharon Harper recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair.

Harper has spent three decades researching ten generations of her family history through DNA research, oral histories, interviews, and genealogy. Fortune, the name of Harper's first nonindigenous ancestor born on American soil, bore the brunt of the nation's first race, gender, and citizenship laws. As Harper traces her family's story through succeeding generations, she shows how American ideas, customs, and laws robbed her ancestors--and the ancestors of so many others--of their humanity and flourishing.

Fortune helps readers understand how America was built upon systems and structures that blessed some and cursed others, allowing Americans of European descent to benefit from the colonization, genocide, enslavement, rape, and exploitation of people of color. As Harper lights a path through national and religious history, she clarifies exactly how and when the world broke and shows the way to redemption for us all. The book culminates with a powerful and compelling vision of truth telling, reparation, and forgiveness that leads to Beloved Community. It includes a foreword by Otis Moss III, illustrations, and a glossy eight-page black-and-white insert featuring photos of Harper's family.

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The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books, explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines.

“On these pages, the Garden of Eden meets the world we live in.”
– Shane Claiborne, activist and author

God once declared everything in the world “very good.”
Can you imagine it?

Through careful exploration of the biblical text, particularly the first three chapters of Genesis, Lisa Sharon Harper shows us what “very good” can look like today—in real time.
Shalom is what God declared. Shalom is what the Kingdom of God looks like. Shalom is when all people are treated equitably and have enough. It’s when families are healed. It’s when churches, schools, and public policies protect human dignity.
Shalom is when the image of God is recognized, protected, and cultivated in every single human. It is the vision God set forth in the Garden and the restoration God desires for every broken relationship. Shalom is the “very good” in the gospel.
Because despite our anxious minds, despite divisions, and despite threats of violence, God’s vision remains: wholeness for a fragmented world. Peace for a hurting soul. Shalom.

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Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014)

Many people have become angry and frustrated with organized religion and evangelical Christianity, in particular. Too often the church has proven to be a source of pain rather than a place of hope. Forgive Us acknowledges the legitimacy of much of the anger toward the church. In truth, Christianity in America has significant brokenness in its history that demands recognition and repentance. Only by this path can the church move forward with its message of forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.

Forgive Us is thus a call to confession. From Psalm 51 to the teachings of Jesus to the prayers of Nehemiah, confession is the proper biblical response when God’s people have injured others and turned their backs on God’s ways. In the book of Nehemiah, the author confesses not only his own sins, but also the sins of his ancestors. The history of the American church demands a Nehemiah-style confession both for our deeds and the deeds of those who came before us.

In each chapter of Forgive Us two pastors who are also academically trained historians provide accurate and compelling histories of some of the American church’s greatest shortcomings. Theologian Soong-Chan Rah and justice leader Lisa Sharon Harper then share theological reflections along with appropriate words of confession and repentance.

Passionate and purposeful, Forgive Us will challenge evangelical readers and issue a heart-felt request to the surrounding culture for forgiveness and a new beginning.

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Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011)

Why do people have a common faith but different political loyalties?
How does the Christian faith shape how we should vote and participate in the political process?

In Left, Right, and Christ, authors D.C. Innes (on the right) and Lisa Sharon Harper (on the left) discuss and explore how the Christian faith speaks directly to American politics today, but with different understanding and applications.

Addressing questions like:

* Does God care about politics? Should we?
* Is it the government's role to take care of the sick?
* Do legalized abortions increase the number of abortions?
* Should we support people's freedom to choose a definition of marriage, even if we disagree with their choice?
* Does a free country mean that everyone is free to come here?
* Is the earth so fragile that the government should step in to protect it?

Harper and Innes craft thought provoking chapters on each issue that will have America talking for a long time.

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Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008)

A leader of the new generation of progressive evangelicals reclaims her faith from partisan politics, in this book in the acclaimed "Does Not Equal" series.

"To let the religious right define evangelical...wipes out the memory of real people who lived and fought for just causes and just social policies because of their faith....I refuse to let the religious right confiscate my heritage."—from Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican...Or Democrat

A new breed of evangelicals, with a fiery passion for economic justice, racial reconciliation, and care for the environment, has abandoned the religious right.

Lisa Sharon Harper, a rising star in this movement, describes the roots of this political shift, the agents of change driving it, and, in interviews with leaders across the political spectrum, the extent of the evangelical rejection of the right-wing political agenda. In Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican...Or Democrat, Harper lays out a manifesto for the new progressive evangelical movement, drawing inspiration from the biblical concepts of shalom and the kingdom of God, as well as from historical predecessors such as William Wilberforce, Sojourner Truth, and John Perkins.

Harper offers a powerful indictment of the religious right, of its role in hijacking evangelical passion and dividing Christians against each other, and—in an agenda that is racist and sexist to the core—of its abandonment of the gospel. She shows how evangelicals, in disengaging from partisan politics, can reclaim their roots and become a new moral voice for the nation.

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