The Black Theology Papers Project features papers presented by the Black Theology Unit of the American Academy of Religion. The journal publishes an annual issue of the proceedings of the AAR Black Theology Unit annual meeting.

The Black Theology Papers Project is an online repository housed at Columbia University that aims to preserve and promote the intellectual heritage of black theology. Andrea C. White (Union Theological Seminary) and Adam Clark (Xavier University), past co-chairs of the AAR Black Theology Unit are the editorial team, along with Josef Sorett (Columbia University).  The Black Theology Papers Project aspires to be a premiere scholarly and teaching resource for students and faculty interested in cutting-edge research and emerging scholarship in the field of black theology.

The journal was launched November 2019 in honor of the 50th anniversary celebration of Dr. James H. Cone’s publication of the groundbreaking work, Black Theology and Black Power (Orbis Books, 1969) and to commemorate 400 years since the enslavement of Africans in the Americas.

Papers are reviewed and selected for presentation and publication by the AAR Black Theology Unit Chairs and Steering Committee and BTPP Editors Andrea White and Adam Clark. 

Open Access Policy

The Black Theology Papers Project is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. Authors retain their copyright and agree to license their articles with a Creative Commons “Attribution” (CC-BY) License. You can read more about Creative Commons licenses at creativecommons.org.

BTPP is a no-fee journal. Authors are not charged for the publication of their articles.

Archiving Policy

BTPP is distributed through Columbia University’s Academic Commons. Academic Commons is Columbia University’s institutional repository, offering long-term public access to research shared by the Columbia community. A program of the Columbia University Libraries, Academic Commons provides secure, replicated storage for files in multiple formats. Academic Commons assigns a DOI and accurate metadata to each work to enhance discoverability.

Files uploaded to Academic Commons are written to an Isilon storage cluster at Columbia University and replicated to an identical system at a secure, offsite facility. The local cluster stores the data in a "best protection possible" policy which provides, at a minimum, guaranteed protection against the loss of any two disks or any one node. When sufficient capacity is available, this is increased automatically. Multiple snapshots are replicated to our disaster recovery site every two hours. The secondary cluster employs the same protections as the primary cluster and both conduct integrity scans to validate that data has not been altered at any point during rebalancing, snapshot, or replication processes.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.