Carter, Rebecca Louise. Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, 272 pages

The book is divided into three parts, each two chapters in length. In the necessary first lay-of-the-land chapter, Carter develops the useful concept of the “Black urban delta.” She also meshes the history of Black New Orleans with her personal history with the city, from visiting her father as a child to meeting Danielle, who lost her firstborn son to gun violence and who would become a key participant in Carter’s research. In chapter 2, Carter explores diverse religious responses to the high homicide rate, visiting an uptown white Catholic group that prays for peace in a universalist manner, a mixed Episcopalian church in Treme that dignifies every single victim of gun violence by naming them, and a mainly white Vodou sosyete that invokes the spirits for healing and protection at “anti-crime ceremonies” performed at downtown intersections. Carter argues that these interventions, though worthy, are too far removed from the “structural and local formations” (87) of violence to be able to counteract the devaluing of Black life by asserting a “sacred Black humanity” (88). She thus settles for the rest of the book on Black Baptist traditions, specifically, Liberty Street Baptist Church in the Central City neighbourhood. Part two sets the missions of Liberty Street in historical and geographical context. In chapter 3, Carter takes us to a “Yes We Care” rally held in early 2009, which she locates along the intertwined paths of the civil rights movement and Black social gospel. Akin to a Black Baptist revival, the rally called on participants to demonstrate care within the African American community, to spread God’s word in order to halt gun violence, and, ultimately, to realize and act on their “somebodiness,” an understanding of Black dignity, worth, and agency articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. Chapter 4 focuses on the work of Liberty Street’s Pastor Samuel, particularly the missions that he took onto the streets of New Orleans in the 1990s and 2000s: mounting campaigns of billboards and signs stating “THOU SHALT NOT KILL” and “ENOUGH,” staging weekly public demonstrations, building a cross-denominational Pastors’ Coalition against violence, and holding outdoor prayer vigils. Carter probes the significance of these missions for Pastor Samuel and other participants, explaining how they inscribe “powerful directives for nonviolence in New Orleans, etching moral belief and a relational framework for human being onto the social, spiritual, and physical grounds of the Crescent City” (131). Of note is that “crescent,” for Carter, does not refer only to the shape of New Orleans along the Mississippi, but to its character—emergent, “on the cusp of change” (12), about to wax or wane—an important insight into this mutable city. Part three, which is the most affecting, centres on Liberty Street’s support group for mothers (and other kinswomen) of murder victims, founded by Danielle. It conveys how the women “raise their dead,” that is, keep and honour deep connections with them by celebrating their birthdays and death anniversaries and by testifying to the intrinsic worth of their lives. Carter theorizes these practices as “restorative kinship,” and shows how they extend out from close family toward the “beloved community” of New Orleans as a whole, by means of the connections the women forge with others impacted by violence, and the visions they communicate of a better, peaceful world in which all human life is valued. Each part is preceded by an evocative photograph and a “‘message’ in the spirit of a pastoral or lay message one would receive in Baptist worship service” (24), lyrically written like an extended fieldwork vignette. All three messages centre the experiences of the Black women in the support …