Shoutin' in the Fire

An American Epistle

By: Danté Stewart

Narrated by: Danté Stewart

A stirring meditation of being Black and learning to love in a loveless, anti-Black world.

"Only once in a lifetime do we come across a writer like Danté Stewart, so young and yet so masterful with the pen. This work is a thing to make dungeons shake and hearts thunder." (Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times best-selling author of The Prophets)

In Shoutin’ in the Fire, Danté Stewart gives breathtaking language to his reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy - both the kind that hangs over our country and the kind that is internalized on a molecular level. Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance - and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world.

In 2016, Stewart was a rising leader at the predominantly White evangelical church he and his family were attending in Augusta, Georgia. Like many young church leaders, Stewart was thrilled at the prospect of growing his voice and influence within the community, and he was excited to break barriers as the church’s first Black preacher. But when Donald Trump began his campaign, so began the unearthing. Stewart started overhearing talk in the pews - comments ranging from microaggressions to outright hostility toward Black Americans. As this violence began to reveal itself en masse, Stewart quickly found himself isolated amid a people unraveled; this community of faith became the place where he and his family now found themselves most alone. This set Stewart on a journey - first out of the White church and then into a liberating pursuit of faith - by looking to the wisdom of the saints that have come before, including James H. Cone, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and by heeding the paradoxical humility of Jesus himself.

This sharply observed journey is an intimate meditation on coming of age in a time of terror. Stewart reveals the profound faith he discovered even after experiencing the violence of the American church: a faith that loves Blackness; speaks truth to pain and trauma; and pursues a truer, realer kind of love than the kind we’re taught, a love that sets us free.

©2021 Danté Stewart (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Some of us joke about Jesus needing better PR than what today’s evangelical church provides. Enter Danté Stewart. With unparalleled candor, vulnerability, and love, Stewart takes us along his personal journey to understanding what it is to be Black, Christian, and American. The church is long overdue for a reckoning with white supremacy, and Stewart has written a brilliant blueprint.” (Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies)

“Danté Stewart breaks himself open and exhibits rare courage. For a man like me, someone who walked away from the church long ago in an effort to preserve my faith, he has provided water with these words. This is a baptismal pool.” (Jason Reynolds, number one New York Times best-selling author of All American Boys, Long Way Down, and Miles Morales: Spider-Man)

“Standing in a centuries old tradition of spiritual autobiography, Shoutin’ in the Fire is at once a coming of age story and a conversion narrative. From Pentecostal origins, he travels through institutions that hold onto an idea of ‘white Jesus,’ and finally to a spiritual reckoning in which he recognizes Black life to be not only valuable but holy.... I highly recommend this book.” (Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons)

This Book was a smack up side your head, and a warm hug…simultaneously.

Please…don’t just take my word for it. Buy it and read it for yourself!

A Must Read!! You will not be disappointed

Shoutin' In The Fire" is an outstanding novel because the author was able to correlate round table discussion topics while simultaneously taking the audience on his journey of self-discovery. Dantes's words were captivating throughout, making it difficult to put the book down. Great job!

You are, without a doubt, making use of your gift.

I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for me, which hopefully includes another book!

Beautifully written memoir

Without question, this is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. I know part of my love of it is because Danté Stewart read the audiobook with his beautiful voice. Shoutin’ in the Fire is a book of lyrical, poetic writing, and I can’t imagine another narrator could have captured it as well. The prose reminds me in the very best way of James Baldwin. I know that will be a standard comparison, not just because of how prominent Baldwin is but also because of how frequently Stewart references him. Baldwin is an author for this age, as Eddie Glaude has written. I don’t want to overplay that comparison, their life experiences are so very different, but also they are both Black in America, with a view of both history and the future and with an eye to the church that this country loves to pay lip service to, but not carry through as it should.

I remember thinking to myself, and maybe saying out loud, at some point years ago, early in my awakening to the racial realities of this world, that as much as they are accurate, I wished there were more books by Black authors that were happier, less wrapped up in pain. The pain is hard to process as a middle-aged white man because it creates an obligation. Observing pain and not responding is a type of pathology that some are commending these days, as some call for resistance to empathy. It took me time to learn and process not just that pain and trauma need recounting, but that the history of race in America means no story can be told by Black authors that does not have pain somewhere in the lens, even if not in the direct words. It took me much longer to see that the very act of writing was an act of hope. I didn’t understand the complaints of Ta’Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me being hopeless. Coates is not hopeless, as I think this video with Thabiti Anyabwile shows. But the hope does not always have to be centered if the presenting problem denies reality.

The other comparison I feel when I read Shoutin’ in the Fire is with Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black. Both books have a chapter on rage, and in both cases, I think the chapter is likely the most powerful in the book. That rage is not a denial of hope; both explicitly point to hope in other places and even in their rage. Both reference James Baldwin’s famous quote about rage that often is shortened to only the first sentence. But the more extended quote is essential:

"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance. Now, since this is so, it’s a great temptation to simplify the issues under the illusion that if you simplify them enough, people will recognize them. I think this illusion is very dangerous because, in fact, it isn’t the way it works. A complex thing can’t be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across."

Stewart makes the statement that echoes James Baldwin and James Cone and Howard Thurman, and many others; he comments that he thought that telling people the reality of what it means to be Black in America would cause white people, especially white Christians, to change. But each of them has to grapple with the fact that simple information is not enough. Cultural change is more complex than simple information, especially when resistance to identifying that change is necessary or even that culture comes into play.

Books like Shoutin’ in the Fire are a gift to white people such as myself. They should be fuel to create understanding, empathy, and motivation to change institutions, especially Christian ones, that are resistant to change. Instead, mostly what we have is discussions of methodology, not discussions of the actual problem. Danté Stewart presents the evidence of his own life, the harm he has felt, the fear he has for his family, especially his children, in the future. To be allowed to read books, especially beautifully written books like this one, is a gift that more need to take up.

Amazing! Should be required reading for all seminarians

What an amazingly vulnerable and courageously written book. You left it all on the pages and to hear your voice reading it was a treat. The words so many white Christians need to hear and embrace if they truly want to do the real work of ministry.

Gives voice to my thoughts & feelings

Loved it! Highly recommend! Well written, even poetic in places. The story of a personal journey...a journey that many of us share and that many of us need to hear.

Must Read

Well done, well performed, well stated. The product should be read by all of the African community.

Achievement of Authentic Christian Testimony

Dante shouts forcefully, poetically, truthfully. He has been heard through his brave, open hearted writing and transforming the terror of living while Black into triumph over evil.

Mesmerizing

I really needed and enjoyed this book. Thank you for your transparency with the duality/multiplicity of feelings we feel as Black people in this country. Thank you for the memory, rage, pieces, body, terror, love, life...all of it.

I was especially interested in the journey from the black church to white theologians to black theologians and scholars to appreciation for the black church. Been there.

I'm looking forward to the next book.!

I pray I remember this forever.

I thank Danté for his black book written with black words spoken in his own beautiful black voice. I had many tears as I listened to his journey, the pain and suffering and terror he experienced. I am thankful for his witness and love of Jesus, his Savior.

the awakening

I really did love it, so enlightening. I learned a lot of things and understand a lot more going thru the last 2 years. it's all so true.