I used to wonder about the propriety of faith in a White Jesus. Now I struggle with the efficacy of faith at all.
How My Mind Has Changed
Theology was not optional for me as a child. It was a matter of life or death.
The Spirit is God’s wild card, played over and over again when old forms fail.
I know one thing: there is holiness.
Early on, I got caught up in the logic of the Spirit—and in the steady beat of black life.
The Vietnam War forced Protestant ethicists to consider Catholic teachings about war, and I learned much from Catholic colleagues. My outlook was also changed by ecumenical contacts of another kind.
This is not a classic conversion story, let alone a pietistic revulsion against the intellect. It is an account of how prayer has the power to change one's perception of the theological task.
For the past two years or so I have begun remembering youthful dreams.
Two inseparable, inexhaustible themes have fascinated me more and more: love and the Holy Spirit.
For seven splendid years (1953-1960) I studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Someone told me that visitors to the seminary were occasionally brought around to the tutors' office, where I worked as a graduate student, in order to glimpse "the Barthian"—of which species I was apparently the only one in captivity in that place.
In the summer of 1963 I was hanging around Harvard’s libraries, worrying about hermeneutics.