About this episode

The episode discusses the contributions of James Cone to Black Theology, featuring insights from Gary Dorrien and Charlene Sinclair.

Week five of Theology for Troublemakers, and we finally got to James Cone — which meant we got to Charlene Sinclair, and I want you to know that the moment Gary introduced her on this call was one of the more moving things we've done in this class. He described her as the student who told Cone she saw something in his early work that nobody else gets — the importance of Fanon to his concept of ontological Blackness — and the way he described the day she defended her dissertation, how he held his one point until the very end so he could announce that this dissertation had explained, like no book ever written, what Fanon actually meant to Cone's thought, tells you everything about who James Cone was as a teacher and who Charlene Sinclair is as a scholar. We started at the beginning: the three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power — the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning, and the assassination of King — and why Cone said bottled rage would have killed him if he hadn't written that book. Gary walked us through the satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim versus a racial one, what ontological Blackness actually meant, and why Cone's sweeping indictment of the…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Guests: Gary Dorrien, Charlene Sinclair

Topics covered

• Black Theology
• Theology for Troublemakers
• ontological Blackness
• whiteness
• womanist challenge
• Fanon's influence
• historical context of Black Power

Keywords

• James Cone
• Black Theology
• Gary Dorrien
• Charlene Sinclair
• Fanon
• whiteness
• womanist theology
• historical context
• Black Power
• The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Negro church, NCBC

Books & works: The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Places: Detroit

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