This book explores how the art of African American quilts, quilt making, and quilters are source material for the study of African American religion.

Aundrea Matthews argues that quilts are as integral to the fabric of African American religion as slave narrative, music, and literature. Stemming from twenty-four months of ethnographic study in Houston, Texas, Matthews emphasizes how quilts tell visual stories, charting diverse types, practices, and rituals of religious life and the diverse ways people use or make quilts in their daily lives for faith formation within contemporary African American culture. These textile diaries not only record African American's personal lives and experiences, but materialize signs, symbols, images, memories, and/or practices representing African cosmology and mythology that sustain and influence African American religious beliefs and art over time and space. Matthews argues that African American quilts provide tangible evidence of the material retention of African religious memories which influenced the religious thinking and creative art of enslaved African American women and their descendants in the United States.