James Cone

As James Cone argued, the universal is revealed in the particular.

The companion book to the PBS series is accessible, comprehensive, and joyful.

I used to wonder about the propriety of faith in a White Jesus. Now I struggle with the efficacy of faith at all.

Cone was a profoundly biblical thinker. His Christology captured my imagination.

Antiblackness is outrageous, but it does not have the last word.

If Jesus is black, he's calling us to do a lot more than affirm the color of his skin.

In portraying Christ’s blackness, he upended the assumptions of a field dominated by white theologians and helped spawn other theories of liberation.

The award honors his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which shows how white supremacy has affected dominant views in the church.

In “God of the Oppressed,” James Cone recounts how Christian responses to the 1967 Detroit riot revealed not only an insensitivity to black suffering but a larger theological bankruptcy on the part of white theologians. As he saw it, they were not genuinely concerned about all cases of violence. Worried about the threat of black revolutionaries, they did not see the structure of violence embedded in U.S. law and carried out by the police. Cone asks: “Why didn’t we hear from the so-called nonviolent Christians when black people were violently enslaved, violently lynched, and violently ghettoized in the name of freedom and democracy?”

As we know the shooting of Michael Brown was not just one incident, in one town. The reason that the fear and concern grew was because it was that proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It was the outcry of people who have been living under a system that has targeted young black men.

So what can we do about it?

How can theology be black if the sources used for its explication are derived primarily from the white Western theological tradition?