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Review Summary: Liberation theology at its best. |
Date: 2007-07-23 |
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Details: Since this book was published, it has consistently been met with an authoritarian thunder by those who cling rigidly to their religious orthodoxy. I read this book while a graduate student in theology at the Pacific School of Religion. The professor who introduced me to Professor Cone's work (no wilting flower herself) Rosemary Radford Ruether, opened a new and vibrant awareness to the work of authors engaged in contextual and liberation theological perspectives.
It is interesting to note that Professor Cone's book was written in a historic moment at the apex of black oppression in cities throughout this country: the oppression was disseminated under the rubric of economic exclusion, educational segregation, environmental terror, and job discrimination, to name a few. While Martin Luther King was the public face of overturning years of white terror perpetuated on black people, Professor Cone was giving voice to the anger and rage of en entire people and demanding the overturning of the forces of white privilege.
While Cone was developing his version of liberation theology independent of its Latin American version developed by Gustav Gutierrez, both authors were giving voice to marginal populations now asserting their human dignity and worth. Moreover, these demands for justice began to form under new contexts of interpretive value of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. The radical message of the gospel still reverberates well into our contemporary moment and raise the same issues Jesus raised in his own day. Patronage and systemic oppression needs to be confronted and overturned. This is the context from which Cone writes - and I suspect - still lives his life.
I give Professor Cone's book my highest recommendation. |
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Review Summary: Still a challenging read |
Date: 2006-12-12 |
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Details: Dr. Cone presents a very challenging view of God and the world. In this work, he calls christians to re-evaluate their view of God and of the Christian faith in light of the experience of the oppressed and downtrodden. It uses the language of color in order to illustrate this point, using the color white to stand for evil, oppression, and sin and the color black to stand for the affirmation of our God given potential. This has clearly been informed by his upbringing and life experience. In this work he calls white people to hate their whiteness and embrace their blackness in solidarity with the oppressed. To use Cone's color language, I doubt many would disagree that Christ is clearly black, and all Christians are called to be as well. |
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Review Summary: Cone cannot love God because he hates white people. |
Date: 2005-11-07 |
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Details: This verse summarizes the spiritual condition of Mr. Conehead. 1Jo 4:20 If anyone says "I love God" and yet hates his fellow Christian, he is a liar, because the one who does not love his fellow Christian whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. Mr. Cone uses Christianity as his platform to spew hate against white people. Sad.
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Review Summary: Anti-Christian Heresy |
Date: 2005-10-31 |
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Details: There's not anything theological about this book at all. In fact, it's not about God, Jesus Christ, Christianity or any other religion. This is nothing more than a hate-mongering diatribe on why blacks should hate whites (and a poorly-written one at that). Here are just a few choice excerpts:
1. "[W]hiteness is the symbol of the Anti-christ."
2. "The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods."
3. "The black experience is the feeling one has when attacking the enemy of black humanity by throwing a Molotov cocktail into a white-owned building and watching it go up in flames. We know, of course, that getting rid of evil takes something more than burning down buildings, but one must start somewhere."
4. "Black theology seeks to analyze the satanic nature of whiteness and by doing so prepare all nonwhites for revolutionary action."
5. "We have reached our limit of tolerance, and if it means death with dignity or life with humiliation we will choose the former. And if that is the choice, we will take some honkies with us."
6. "To be black is to be committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores."
Why anyone, regardless of race, creed, color or even religion would buy this rubbish is beyond me. It's nothing more than hate-as-theology. |
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Review Summary: Orgins of Black Theology |
Date: 2003-11-09 |
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Details: Worked with this book for a group presentation on Black Liberation Theology, and it is the standard for this genre of theology. Cone was tired of theology only being looked at from an Anglo perspective. This theology tied in well with the Black Power movement of the 1960s, an offshoot of the Civil Rights movement that was tired of turning the other cheek to white oppression. This book clearly outlines how to look at the bible from the perspective of someone who has been in bondage for 400 years. While I do not hold to this view of theology, it did help me understand this viewpoint much better than before. B
Joseph Dworak |
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out of 14 Reviews
