James Cone

James Cone

James H. Cone was a contributing editor of Sojourners.

David Gushee Connection

'Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies' Podcast

From the Freedom Road.us 'Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies' Podcast with Lisa Sharon Harper:,

This month we are joined by one of the foremost Christian ethicists in the world, Dr. David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, and Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (“Free University”) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow, International Baptist Theological Study Centre and he is the author of several books, most recently, Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies.

Dr. Gushee was invited to speak with us because, well—we need his wisdom and expertise right now. Not only is the Christian church a consistent foe of democracy in an age when democracy is at risk around the world and here at home—but also to hear his thoughts on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Portion of the transcript:

Lisa Sharon Harper: "...We need some expertise right now about this. this democracy thing and about how Christianity is actually not helping across the globe and how we can counter that [00:02:00] within the church.

Lisa Sharon Harper: "...in the interest actually of transparency, I should say, and actually brag that in my upcoming PhD program at the Free University in Amsterdam, uh, David is going to be my supervisor.

Yes. So I want to say, I’m so excited to work with you and I’m also excited for this conversation. Because, um, you know, you know, my work and I know, I know your work and, um, and I know that you really are a critical, probably one of the, one of the most critical voices for the church in this moment.

David Gushee: "Well, Glen Stassen… Glen Stassen the ethics, the main ethics professor at Southern Seminary and my mentor. After I finished or as I was finishing my MDiv, uh, it was clear I needed to do a PhD. It became really clear. I wanted it to be in ethics. He said, it’s time for you to broaden.

It’s time for you to get outside this. little subculture. He knew Union. He had friends at Union. He had done some studying at Union. I applied to five different schools. The one criteria was nothing below the Mason Dixon line and nothing related to the Baptists. But the one I ended up with was Union and I mean, I got to study with James Cone and Beverly Harrison, with Larry Rasmussen with Cornel West, I didn’t have a chance to have a class with him, but he was there at that time. And so it was a mind blowing experience. It [00:07:00] was way ahead of what I was ready to process at that time, but it left its traces, I would say.

[...]

"For University Amsterdam is really especially focused on public, uh, social, um, you know, political, but, you know, human community kind of issues, right? So that was the version of Christian ethics that I was taught by Glen Stassen, by Larry Rasmussen, by, you know, James Cone, [00:08:00] Christian engagement for, for justice and righteousness, for mercy and love, for the reign of God in a broken world.

And so one way to think about it kind of autobiographically is that I grew up in a family where we, my dad worked for the government and we talked about policy issues like a lot. I would joke about how we’d be sitting around the table reading the Washington Post and talking about environmental policy when I was like 10, you know, because that’s what my dad did, energy and environment.

"White man is the Devil"

1969 book Black Theology and Black Power Cone announced: "The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people. . . . All white men are responsible for white oppression. . . . Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.'. . . Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to further enslavement." Contending that the structures of a still-racist society need to be dismantled, Cone is impatient with claims that the race situation in America has improved. In a 2004 essay he wrote, "Black suffering is getting worse, not better. . . . White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even though black people are dying daily from its poison" (in Living Stones in the Household of God)."

Congress on Religion and Policies

Theologies of Peace and Justice: A Congress on Religion and Politics. Chicago Theological Seminary May 27-30, 1988.

Plenary Speakers:

• Jesse Jackson
• Michael Harrington
• Rosemary Ruether
• Bonganjalo Goba
• Cornel West
• Arthur Waskow
• James Cone
• Jim Wallis
• Martin Marty
• John Cort
• Rebecca Chopp
• Harvey Cox
• Michael Lerner
• Schubert Ogden
• Robert Aitken Roshi

For conference information please contact: Religion & Politics Congress Rm 1201, 1608 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL 60647

Cuban church visit

June 22-28 1984, at the Methodist Church 23rd and K Streets a "Theological Seminar: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memoriam" was held the Valedo District of Havana, Cuba.

Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper reported that the organizers were the Ecumenical Council of Cuba, the Baptist Worker-Student Coordination of Cuba, and the Caribbean Council of Churches.

The Black Theology Project was listed as a US sponsor, and the Soviet controlled Christian Peace Conference was also represented.

The appearance of US Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, with Cuban president Fidel Castro, "was the highlight of a King memorial service attended by some 300 representatives of US, Caribbean and Cuban churches.

Jackson was introduced by Benjamin Chavis.

Other attendees included George C.L. Cummings, instructor in Theology of the Chicago Theological Seminary, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor UCC Trinity Church Chicago, Tyrone Fitts, National Council of Churches Racial Justice program, Thelma C. Adair, executive director Church Women United, William Babley, director Racial Union Program Methodist Church, Esmerelda Brown Methodist Church, Calvin Butts Abyssinian Baptist Church, James Cone Union Theological Seminary, Howard Dodson chairman Black Theology Project, Jualynne Dodson dean Union Theological Seminary, Noel Eskind Emory University, Robert Franklin, professor of Ethics University of Chicago, Dwight Hopkins, vice chairman Black Theology Project, president Union Theological Seminary student association, Carolyn Knight, assistant pastor Canaan Baptist Church New York, Mark Ridley-Thomas, executive director Southern Christian Leadership Conference - West, Los Angeles, Gayraud Wilmore, dean Interdenominational Theological Seminary New York.

DSA pamphlet

In 1990, Democratic Socialists of America was selling a list of pamphlets, mainly by members, including "The Black Church and Marxism", by James Cone.

From The Institute for Democratic Socialism.

DSA contributor

Theologian James Cone, author of the landmark 1970 A Black Theology of Liberation, contributed to the religious socialism group of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Malcolm X conference

A conference, Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and a Legacy of Struggle was held in New York City, November 14 1990.

The panel "New Research on Malcolm X" consisted of;

Chairperson:

• Ron Bailey, Northeastern University

Panel:

• William Sales, Seton Hall University, author of Southern Africa: Same Struggle, Same Fight

• Bell Hooks, Oberlin College, author of Yearning: Critiques of Race, Gender, and Class

• James Cone, Union theological Seminary, author of Martin and Malcolm: American Dream or Nightmare?

Black Liberation Theology

According to National Review commentator Stanley Kurtz;

James H. Cone, founder and leading light of black-liberation theology, is the Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary, New York. Wright acknowledges Cone's work as the basis of Trinity's perspective, and Cone points to Trinity as the church that best exemplifies his message. Cone's 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power is the founding text of black-liberation theology, predating even much of the influential, Marxist-inspired liberation theology that swept Latin America in the 1970s. Cone's work is repeatedly echoed in Wright's sermons and statements. While Wright and Cone differ on some minor issues, Cone's theology is the first and best place to look for the intellectual context within which Wright's views took shape.

The black intellectual's goal, says Cone, is to "aid in the destruction of America as he knows it." Such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt. The black-power theologian's goal is to tell the story of American oppression so powerfully and precisely that white men will "tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil." In the preface to his 1970 book, A Black Theology of Liberation, Wright wrote: "There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: 'How can we become black?'"

So what exactly is "black power"? Echoing Malcolm X, Cone defines it as "complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary." Open, violent rebellion is very much included in "whatever means"; like the radical anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon, on whom he sometimes draws, Cone sees violent rebellion as a transformative expression of the humanity of the oppressed. Drawing on existential theology, Cone defends those who looted during the urban riots of the late 1960s as affirming their "being," rather than simply grasping and destroying. Modifying Descartes, Cone explains the rioters' implicit message as "I rebel, therefore we exist."

"Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox"

"Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox", October 1, 2001 by Arvind Sharma (Author).

Harvey Cox burst onto the religious-publishing scene in 1962 with his provocative book, The Secular City. His assertions about the consequences of the modern secular world for religion changed forever the way that theologians and clergy approached their tasks of God-talk in late modernity. Always prescient about the religious scene, Cox virtually predicted the "turn east" that many American religious seekers took in the late '60s and early '70s. His books on world religions (Many Mansions), Pentecostalism (Fire from Heaven), and fundamentalism and liberation theology (Religion in the Secular City) have all provided trenchant commentary on the changing face of American religion. In this exciting collection of twenty essays, Sharma and his contributors honor Cox's seminal contributions to the study of religion. The first section of the book includes essays on Cox's life and work at Harvard, where he is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity, and his work as a liberation theologian in the Third World.

The second section features theologians such as Leonardo Boff, James Cone, Hans Kung, Jurgen Moltmann, and Richard L. Rubenstein, who use Cox's themes of interreligious dialogue, grassroots theology, and religion and secularization as the starting points for their own essays on these themes. Contributors to the volume include: Cornel West, Harvard University; Arvind Sharma, McGill University; Robert McAfee Brown, Emeritus, Pacific School of Religion; John C. Cort, Nahant, Massachusetts; Jorge Pixley, Seminario Teológico Buatista, Managua, Nicaragua; Rodney Peterson, Boston Theological Institute; Victor Wan-Tatah, Youngstown State University; Frank D. Macchia, Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God; William Hamilton, Sarasota, Florida; Robert Bellah, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley; Eldin Villafane, CUTEEP, Boston; Jurgen Moltmann, Tübingen; Hans Küng, Tübingen; James H. Cone, Union Theological Seminary; Leonardo Boff, Brazil; Margaret Guider, Weston Jesuit School of Theology; Arthur Green, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; [Satianathan Clarke], United Theological College, Bangalore; Richard L. Rubenstein, University of Bridgeport; Iain Maclean, James Madison University; William Martin, Rice University; Anne Foerst, MIT; and Elinor W. Gadon, Institute of Integral Studies. Arvind Sharma is Bicks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and the editor of A Dome of Many Colors, published by Trinity Press International.

External links

• Sojourners website

References

Template:Reflist