“Challenging taken-for-granted suppositions about the ties between race and religion and the forms of Black Christianity that come to matter in African American and Afro-Caribbean expressions of faith, Todne Thomas powerfully articulates a mode of ‘kincraft’ that redefines everyday and existential notions of familiality, religiosity, spatialization, and political community. To engage with her work is to completely reimagine what the anthropology of religion—and the very anthropological project itself—should be. An incredibly important contribution.” - John L. Jackson Jr., author of Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem
“Todne Thomas tells a big story about the lived experience of navigating multiple identities and creating meaningful purpose within a community, complicating and refuting racialized narratives of evangelicalism and narrow interpretations of black identity politics in the process. She effectively shows what it means to be a black evangelical.” - Andrea C. Abrams, author of God and Blackness: Race, Gender, and Identity in a Middle Class Afrocentric Church
"Kincraft illustrates how Black evangelicals in the United States, drawing on their own Afro-diasporic orientations and sacred imaginaries, have worked to create their own mechanisms of spiritual and relational belonging against the fixed racial and social positionalities reinscribed by White evangelical culture. Moreover, Thomas’ exploration of the spiritual and racial kinship endemic to kincraft can and should be read furthermore as an example of Africana religious agency." - Darrius D. Hills, Reading Religion
"Kincraft is a rich, rewarding, intellectually challenging ethnographic study of a community of Afro-Caribbean churchgoers, in the Atlanta area, who were historically associated with the Plymouth Brethren. . . . Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - P. Harvey, Choice
"Kincraft reorients the ways we think about how religion manifests in people’s daily lives at both institutional and interpersonal levels. Thomas’ work reminds scholars how important it is to account for both ethno-racial and denominational differences when analyzing religious groups and behaviors, and what is overlooked when we do not." - Shaonta' E. Allen, Sociology of Religion
"One of the fascinating tensions Thomas conveys is between Black evangelicals’ theological reckoning with racial struggles and a commitment to prioritize 'Christian family' over 'worldly' concerns (p. 53). The ethnographic material is robustly presented, complemented by a revealing archival analysis of the founding evangelist’s ministry career. . . . [A] powerful testimony to how centrally racialization figures in the formation and lived expression of the varieties of US evangelicalism." - James S. Bielo, American Anthropologist
"Some books serve notice to the academy that it needs to rethink its approaches. Todne Thomas’s Kincraft is such a book which will reshape the field of African American religious studies in profound ways." - Mary Beth S. Mathews, Journal of Contemporary Religion
"Kincraft is an intimate, revealing portrayal of the inner workings of a biblical community. . . . [T]his is an intellectually stimulating, rigorous, and important work that reveals the deeper spirituality of a church tradition that has been largely overlooked in both Black church and white evangelical circles. Thomas has done an excellent job of bringing this tradition to the foreground and, in so doing, forcing a timely reconsideration of what we define and understand as the Black church and mainstream evangelicalism." - William Ackah, Journal of Anthropological Research
"Kincraft is a refreshing inclusion as a source for studying US religious history and culture. . . . Thomas shows how Black religious actors have tapped into their religious tradition to create meaningful communities and a sense of belonging that is unmoved by the racism of the broader evangelical movement." - Tejai Beulah Howard, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"Kincraft is an exemplar of ethnographic research and writing. Thomas is meticulous in her approach, thoughtfully weaving ethnographic details and scholarly analysis with depth and precision." - Aimee Villarreal, New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity
"Thomas’ Afro-diasporic framing invokes a broad range of literatures that enrich an anthropology of Christianity that has considerably lacked a racial lens since its formation as an anthropological project. Reading racial-religious intersubjectivity through kincraft allows Thomas to consider personhood and kinship outside of the disciplinary categories that reproduce dominant conceptions of the human (i.e. white bourgeois man)."
- Monique Azzara, New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity
"[Thomas's] work transcends the immediacy of the specifics of community, the ethnoracial and sociocultural location of the congregations she worked with, and the topics and anthropological subfields she is occupied with, religion and kinship, and speaks to other peoples, other worlds, other practices." - Vilma SanCago-Irizarry, New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity
