In a world divided by race, ethnicity, gender, violence, and hate, Harold Recinos's Good News from the Barrio explores the ways in which the good news of the gospel is at work in Latino barrios. He challenges Christians to listen to the gospel in these contexts and offer a prophetic witness to the nation and the church.

Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church

Recinos, Harold J.

Religion & Spirituality

Westminster/John Knox Press

Discusses the transformation that has occurred in the Church of All Nations, a Latino Congregation on the Lower East Side of New York City

Hear the Cry: A Latino Pastor Challenges the Church

Westminster John Knox Pr

In Who Comes in the Name of the Lord?, Harold J. Recinos advances the thesis that God has already prepared a future for mainline churches in Christ at the margins of society. That margin is the barrio -- a contemporary Nazareth -- judged by society as inferior, worthless, and productive of nothing good. Drawing on the biblical witness, Recinos develops a perspective that shows that God identifies with those who are poor, marginal, weak, and lowly in society. God's option for the lowly, he asserts, takes the form of incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. God-in-Jesus is enfleshed in the history of an unimportant place known as Nazareth of Galilee. Nazareth, an inferior and worthless place, supports God on its barrio streets. Far from the Temple, on the town roads and with fisher-folk, Jesus first reveals in a fresh way the God of the poor and lowly. The cultural role of mainline Christians, argues Recinos, is not to be guardians of society; rather, mainline Christians and their churches are to shape and amend their culture in response to the work of God in human history. That work is imaged by feasting with the uninvited people who are kept isolated from mainstream society, yet presuppose the reality of God. Thus, Recinos argues for a missional ecclesiology suggesting that local congregations are instruments of a sacred love that renews the world of uninvited guests and forgotten people. The true church, he says, does not meet the anguished cry of people at the margins of life with silence but with dikaioma ("a just action") which assures shalom. The author then suggests several ways the local church can announce the reign of God and peace with justice, beginning in the barrio. "Once again, Harold Recinos opens up the gospel for us from the perspective of the barrio, and in particular of those recent immigrants who have arrived at the barrio as refugees from situations of unspeakable violence and dehumanization. This is a hard-hitting book about a hard-hitting Jesus. Not recommended for those who are looking for a soft, other-worldly word of inspiration. But certainly required reading for any who wish to be faithful to Jesus in our contemporary society!" --Justo L. González

Who Comes in the Name of the Lord?: Jesus at the Margins

Christian Books & Bibles

Recinos, Hal J.

Churches & Church Leadership

ABINGDON PRESS *

Recinos discovered a love for poetry after being abandoned by Latino immigrant parents and living on the streets dealing with drugs, poverty, violence, racial discrimination, and existential desolation. After several homeless years, he was taken into the family of a white Presbyterian minister and guided back to school. Later, attending graduate school in New York City, Recinos befriended Nuyorican poets the late Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican poets cafe. Word Simple is a collection of poetry that raises questions about how society is constructed from the context of people who are routinely silenced by history. Recinos' poems describe the realities of faith, love, struggle, migration, refugee flight, urban depravity, the politics of hate, and the fierce anger of the indignity of a life of marginality in society. His poetry not only expresses outrage and despair in the face of unjust suffering in the world, but he projects the struggles and beauty of invisible people who tilt always toward recognition. By his choice of subjects in his poetry, Recinos provides readers with sensitive and ethical resources to show the horror and joys of life. Graffiti on a page!

Word Simple

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Resource Publications

Recinos discovered a love for poetry living on the streets after being abandoned by immigrant Latino parents. At age sixteen, a White Presbyterian minister made him a part of his family and guided him back to school. Recinos finished high school, attended undergraduate school in Ohio and later graduate school in New York, where he befriended the Nuyorican poet the late Miguel Pinero who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican poets cafe. After Eden registers life at the edges of American society in ways that are both personal and universal in human experience. In this collection, poems address issues of police brutality, gun violence, immigrants' rights, the blighted urban landscape, death, hunger, religious violence, drug addiction, pluralism, spirituality, family life, political corruption, cultural cruelty, struggles for justice, and the pulse of everyday life in overlooked places. The metaphor in the title is reflected in poems that record the sounds of kindness and cruelty, sorrows and joys, greed and generosity, inequality and powerlessness, good and evil, death and life in the context of struggles to live meaningfully awake--consciously--in society.

After Eden

Recinos' love for poetry dates back to being abandoned by Latino parents at age twelve to live on New York City streets. When he turned sixteen, he was taken into the family of a white Presbyterian minister and guided back to school. After finishing high school, Recinos attended undergraduate school in Ohio and graduate school in New York, where he befriended the Nuyorican poets Miguel Pinero and Pedro Pietri, who encouraged him to write and read poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Stony the Road engages life outside of mainstream American society and picks its way through places of despair and marginality to the revelations of belonging that protest indifference and inequality. The collection raises questions and proposes responses to the crisis of understanding in economic and political life, as well as the cultural narrative that America welcomes strangers. The poems tap into the changing mood of American life and the obscured world of rejected human beings and communities by exploring lives worth telling.

Stony the Road

Resource Publications (CA)

“Cornered by the Dark is a triumph.” 
—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao\nW. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Howard Thurman, Julia Equivel, Thomas Merton, Langston Hughes, Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero, in their work make a connection between poetry, social criticism and the meaning of life together—that is a part of Harold Recinos’ literary labor. His work creates a fusion between the personal and the public in verse that is searching, expansive, and walking hurt streets. Cornered by the Dark is a work about truth-telling and witness-bearing to the marginal men, women, and children who tell their story about a culture of indifference and callousness while finding courage and compassion to hope in everyday life.\nCornered by the Dark is published under Paraclete Press's Iron Pen imprint. In the book of Job, a suffering man pours out his anguish to his Maker. From the depths of his pain, he reveals a trust in God's goodness that is stronger than his despair, giving humanity some of the most beautiful and poetic verses of all time. Paraclete's Iron Pen imprint is inspired by this spirit of unvarnished honesty and tenacious hope.

Cornered by the Dark: Poems (Paraclete Poetry)

Iron Pen

Product Description The Days You Bring is poetry that documents the nuances of the human condition at the edges of society by lifting up people negotiating their sense of the call and fragility of life. The collection comments on life on the streets, in cities, villages, contemporary society, and across borders by describing the character of human beings who especially insist they do not have to beg the question of their humanity in the world. The poems invite the reader to step into the world of persons who carry the long history of inequality in their souls and talk about beauty, freedom, violence, legal barriers, delayed dreams, neighbourhood troubles, the struggles for equality, and ways of transcending suffering. Each poem creates a space for the reader to bring their own baggage, identity, experience, joys, and suffering to a space of confession, hope, and release. The collection is a contribution to the artistic expression of our time, with its polarization and social upheaval, and cultivates the courage to reflect in the world with the marginal men, women, and children seeking the common humanization life together. Review "In The Days You Bring, we walk the 'long walk' with Recinos through the barrio's streets, weeping unabashedly for its 'crucified people' and left to contemplate the 'horrifying obscenity of forgetfulness.' Yet so, too, do we revel in its subtle raptures and improbable blossoms. Against the 'thick silence' of an indifferent world and the 'pious white lies' of history, The Days You Bring asks us, Can you hear the barrio's song? Its canto and hymns? Its 'unanswered prayers'?" --Éric Morales-Franceschini, University of Georgia "This is a magnificent work of art. . . . These poems urgently reprimand white Americans for their belief in a God who sanctions a racist capitalism that can't afford to care about the barrio, the jail, and the border. Recinos is 'carrying this cold / country in my brown body' with ecstatic grief shot through with grace restored to its name." --Katie Ford, University of California, Riverside "I have often thought that American presidents should add a poet or two to their cabinets. It seems to me that along with financiers, generals, lawyers, physicians, and scientists, a bard should be part of this assembly of wisdom for a nation. Harold Recinos is an operatic poet for our time. In his new collection, he tells Americans exactly what they need to hear right now--full blast--about the life we share so they can change it." --Lori Marie Carlson-Hijuelos, author of Voices in First Person: Reflections on Latino Identity "The impassioned poems of protest in The Days You Bring contribute to poetry's social justice tradition, offering us closely observed and tender chronicles of the innocent who suffer. Recinos's outpourings of torrential rage and sorrow are leavened by finely grained moments of soft grace." --Joy Castro, University of Nebraska-Lincoln "In this collection of truth-telling poetry, Harold Recinos weeps with love for the dehumanized and marginalized of society. He laments over injustice, yet he does more than this. He dreams of a more luminous future and hopes amid human hurts until he can say in the end, literally, 'Amen!' If you desire to be lit by the fire of a just God, read this book. These poems are from the tongue of a prophet." --Luke A. Powery, Duke University About the Author Harold J. Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. Among his publications are Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church (2006), Wading Through Many Voices: Toward a Theology of Public Conversation (2011), The Coming Day (Wipf & Stock, 2019), Wading in the River (Wipf & Stock, 2021), and Where the Sidewalks Meet (Wipf & Stock, 2022). He completed a PhD with honors in cultural anthropology in 1993 from the American University in Washington, DC. Since the mid-1980s, Recinos has work

The Days You Bring

Poetry

The Looking Glass: Far and Near

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Recinos, Harold J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Recinos, Harold J.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Recinos, Harold J.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Good News from the Barrio: Prophetic Witness for the Church

Hear the Cry: A Latino Pastor Challenges the Church

Who Comes in the Name of the Lord?: Jesus at the Margins

Word Simple

After Eden

Stony the Road

Stony the Road

Cornered by the Dark: Poems (Paraclete Poetry)

The Days You Bring

The Looking Glass: Far and Near