"Come-to-Jesus Stuff" in James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain and The Amen Corner

Olson, Barbara K.

doi:10.2307/3042466

Cited by 11 publications

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“…Barbara K. Olson concludes that "Baldwin's intended denunciation [of his childhood faith] was undermined by the black church idiom he chose to use. " 15 Is there a more charitable way of capturing Baldwin's ambivalence about a black church idiom? In the face of such a debate about Baldwin's relationship to his strand of Christianity, a "dialectical" solution such as the one o ered by Michael F. Lynch seems promising.…”

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Kairotic Time, Recognition, and Freedom in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain

Birdwell¹

2018

James Baldwin Review

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Go Tell It on the Mountain sheds light on James Baldwin’s response to his Pentecostal religious inheritance. Baldwin writes protagonist John Grimes’s experience of “salvation” as an act of his own break with his past and the inauguration of a new vocation as authorial witness of his times. This break is premised on the experience of kairos, a form of time that was derived from Baldwin’s experience of Pentecostalism. Through John Grimes’s experience, Baldwin represents a break with the past that begins with the kairotic moment and progresses through the beginnings of self-love and the possibility of freedom enabled by this love. This essay contributes a new perspective on discussions of Baldwin’s representation of time and his relationship to Christianity.

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confidence: 99%