James Baldwin's Understanding of God - Overwhelming Desire and Joy (Hardcover)

James Baldwin's Understanding of God: Overwhelming Desire and Joy focuses on Baldwin's experiences as a gifted black writer who fought valiantly against racism and wrote openly about homosexual relationships. Baldwin's God is a 'mysteriously impersonal' force he calls love- 'something . . . like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you.' For Baldwin, 'To be with God is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you.' He writes, 'I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better. I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.'
Young covers James Baldwin's life from his mid-teens to his death through accounts and analyses of his essays and novels. Sometimes his 'theology' - what he has to say about his 'God' - comes straight from his text; other times Young deduces it from his non-fiction prose and the implications of his novels and their protagonists. Josiah Young places those works in the context of several historic events that were taking place in the United States at that time.