By Aaron Robertson | Commonweal

Nearly seven years ago, I became curious about Black American Catholic fiction for a simple reason: I didn’t know much about Black Catholic history, and I wondered whether novelists had taken it up. I’m not Catholic myself—I grew up Baptist and now identify as agnostic—though much of my writing centers the dynamic spiritual lives of Black Americans, particularly those who have found sacred meaning even as their lives are desacralized by the world around them. Given the scale of the Church’s entanglement with Black American life—from its role in the slave trade to its countless examples of institutionalized exclusion—one would think fiction would have something to say about it. Where are the novels about Vatican II and its reverberations in Black parishes, or the countercultural bent of Black Catholic sisters and brothers in the 1960s?