Read an excerpt from chapter 1, "Giovanni’s Eden" from Jamall A. Calloway's IMAGINING EDEN: BLACK THEOLOGY AND THE SEARCH FOR PARADISE. In this deeply interdisciplinary and poetically written book, Calloway explores the presence of Eden and the aftermath of the Fall in works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Alice Walker. In reflecting on Eden, he contends, these writers rethought what paradise could mean in the face of the catastrophes of the Black experience.
