I’m rereading a chapter of James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree in advance of a welcoming churches retreat in Washington, D.C. this week. Chapter 2 discusses White American Christianity’s inability to see Jesus in the Black people that White Christians lynched between the 1880s and the end of World War II. Cone focuses mostly […]
Faithful ambivalence
James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree includes haunting accounts of racist violence and religious apathy, and several quotes from Black poets and writers reflecting on Christianity in the United States and the US’ treatment of Native and Black people here. A chapter on artists’ interpretations of the Christian crucifixion story and its similarities with their social […]
(CN) Moderate and neutral
Content note: descriptions of anti-Black lynching and White terrorism. This post is related to yesterday’s comments on torture. I’m at that point in The Cross and the Lynching Tree where James Cone asks how Reinhold Niebuhr, one of 20th Century America’s leading Christian theologians, managed to live through the heyday of anti-Black lynching but never […]
