We lost a giant. Reverend Jesse Jackson has passed away, and I wanted to share this conversation we had with him back during lockdown in 2020 as part of the Black Theology reading group Adam Clark and I were running with over 3,000 people. We were joined by Grace Ji-Sun Kim, who edited a collection of Jackson's sermons and speeches called Keeping Hope Alive, and the Reverend himself showed up and gave us a masterclass in what it looks like when theology breaks out of its bubble — and that bubble image is the thing that'll stick with you. Jackson talked about growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, where the entire Black community lived behind walls that white people set up for exploitation, and how your theology can either reinforce the bubble or blow it apart. He drew a sharp line between piety — behaving, adjusting, staying safe — and power, which is what happens when you follow a Jesus who challenges domination systems instead of one who follows you to the back of the bus. He gave us the real history of the movement, from Rosa Parks and Emmett Till to Fannie Lou Hamer and Daisy Bates, made a clear-eyed and probably controversial distinction between King and Malcolm — arguing Malcolm never really broke out of the bubble while King changed actual public policy — and told the origin story of both "I Am Somebody" and "Keep Hope Alive." He talked about being one of the first Black ministers to publicly embrace the LGBTQ community, about internationalizing Black identity from "Black" to "African American," and about why Obery Hendricks' The Politics of Jesus changed how he saw Christ. Grace brought the warmth and the theological framing, Adam brought the hard questions about Kwame Ture and SNCC, and I mostly just sat there grateful to be in the room with a man who spent his entire life pulling down walls so the sun could get in.

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What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

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Keeping Hope Alive: A Conversation with Rev. Jesse Jackson