The Black male scholars within this important book are painfully aware that the brutal murder of George Floyd was not due to a few "bad apples." They understand that they are perceived as "threats" and "criminals" within a distorted white imaginary that is embedded with processes of mythopoetic construction, racial capitalism, and a deep anti-Black male social ontology. Edited by prominent philosopher George Yancy, Black Men from behind the Veil: Ontological Interrogations emphasizes the importance of Black male epistemic agency and courage to speak the truth regarding an America that values Black male life on the cheap and that attempts to control the movement of Black men, their capacity to breathe, and their being through anti-Black technologies of surveillance, confinement, policing, and white nation-building. There is no single monolithic Black male voice that dominates this crucial and necessary text. Each voice speaks of pain behind the Veil, revealing narrative specificity and an important recursive truth: Black men, within the white American psyche, are both necessary and yet disposable. The existential and sociohistorical weight of this truth is made painfully clear through the voices of these Black men.

Frederick Douglass and the Philosophy of Religion: An Interpretation of Narrative, Art, and Politics addresses Douglass's narrative method and the reformed epistemology of analytic theism within the context of incarnational theology. Timothy J. Golden argues that in this context, Douglass's use of narrative maintains a robust moral, social, and political engagement-and thus a closer connection to an authentic Christian theology-in a way that analytic theism does not. To show this contrast, Golden presents existential and phenomenological interpretations of Douglass, reading him with Kierkegaard, Kafka, and Levinas. Golden also interprets Douglass's use of moral suasion with Kant's moments of aesthetic judgment and his account of judgment as a mediating faculty between the understanding and reason. Golden concludes the book with reflection on how Douglass's incarnational theology connects to his future philosophical and theological work, work that understands consciousness (subjectivity) as saturated in time understood as history. The resulting understanding of consciousness provides tools to overcome abstraction not only in social and political philosophy, Christianity, and philosophical theology, but also in gender studies.