Red Lip Theology:, Candice Marie Benbow

Description

Red Lip Theology: For Church Girls Who’ve Considered Tithing to the Beauty Supply Store When Sunday Morning Isn’t Enough
by Candice Marie Benbow
Foreword by Melissa Harris-Perry
Hardcover | January 18, 2022

Red Lip Theology is a bold, intimate essay collection that reimagines Christian faith through the lived experiences, desires, and brilliance of Black women. Written by theologian and cultural critic Candice Marie Benbow, the book dismantles respectability politics and rigid religious dogma while affirming pleasure, beauty, grief, sexuality, and radical self-love as sacred.

Blurring the line between the righteous and the irreverent, Benbow crafts a progressive theology rooted in feminism, activism, and spiritual honesty. Her essays move fluidly between the personal and the political, engaging themes of heartbreak, forgiveness, longing, and survival, while naming the deep wounds many women carry from church spaces that failed to love them fully.

With sharp insight and lyrical power, Benbow speaks directly to “church girls” who learned early how to perform holiness while silencing their own needs, bodies, and questions. She offers not easy answers, but permission: to wrestle with faith, to reject shame, and to claim wholeness on one’s own terms. The result is a theology that makes room for red lipstick, rage, softness, and joy at the altar.

Both spiritually grounding and intellectually expansive, Red Lip Theology invites Black women into deeper freedom while opening transformative pathways for non-Black readers and allies seeking a more just, embodied, and loving faith.

This title is a remainder, offered at half the original cover price. Remainder copies are new and unread, but may show minor shelf wear.