“Religious naturalism” by and large seems to be an American movement of liberal, “white” scholars, and scientists. With her plea for an African American religious naturalism, Carol Wayne White adds something important: sensitivity towards issues of race and social inequality. In principle, naturalism should have no difficulty in accommodating such concerns, as it is universalist in orientation (all humans belong to a single category, in a naturalistic view), but its universalist discourse may well mask real differences—whether between Western and non‐Western settings, or other sources of unequal circumstances and opportunities. She speaks of “sacred humanity,” which phrase expresses a universal value, a notion which in her first chapter “emerges from a synthesis of African American religious intellectual thought and critical theory” (5). The second chapter relates the understanding of humanity to modern science, to understand humans as “nature made aware of itself” (6). In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, she puts in the spotlight some African American religious thinkers who valued science and may be taken as examples for a religious naturalist orientation: Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), and James Baldwin (1924–1987). The concluding chapter presents her plea “Toward an African American Religious Naturalism.”

The plea is important. I also found it challenging. Religious naturalism seems to appropriate the universality of science for a universalist religious position. By drawing on science, religious naturalism intentionally seeks to avoid the bias that comes with particular religious, cultural, and ethnic traditions. But humans live their lives always as particular, situated humans; we do not merely speak language, but always a particular language. By situating her proposal for religious naturalism in the context of African American lives and sensibilities, those who might consider themselves not as the primary audience might at least take home the message that religious naturalism should accommodate genuine pluralism, in order to be sensitive to important features of human lives and situations.