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 Negro church before 1968 was, as Gary put it, seriously flawed even as it produced a towering theology. We got into the womanist challenge — Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing there is nothing redeeming in the cross — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until Delores retired and Emily Towns went to Yale; he needed just enough personal distance to think it through. Then Charlene took us somewhere unexpected on Niebuhr: she asked, quietly, whether there wasn’t a personal parallel between the Niebuhr brothers and the Cone brothers — Richard the better theologian, Reinhold the extravert who needed the crowd — and Gary spun it out for ten minutes in a way that you could tell he had been sitting with for years and had never said in public. We ended with Caleb’s question about what it means for white Christians to actually hear the cry of Black blood, and Charlene answered it by describing her teenage grandson trembling in her arms, his whole body shaking, saying he didn’t want to die. That’s where the class ended. That’s where James Cone’s theology begins.

If you haven’t joined the class yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Last session is next week — social ethics, full circle. And come to Theology Beer Camp, where Gary, Arron, and Cornel West will all be in the same room.

In the podcast we discuss…

The three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power: the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning in 1967, and the assassination of King in April 1968
Why Cone said he could not have written that book in Adrian, Michigan — and why bottled rage would have killed him
Ontological Blackness: why Cone’s critics could only hear it literally, and why he usually declined to correct them
The satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim about demonic forces, not a claim about the humanity of white people
Cone, Barth, and Tillich: why Jim was mostly on the Barth side, how Tillich saved him from Barth’s narrowness, and why he smuggled Tillich into his intro course by classifying him as neo-orthodox
Cornel West, the 1975 Theology in the Americas showdown with Latin American theologians, and why Cone’s one-factor viewpoint finally broke — and what changed
The womanist challenge: Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing nothing in the cross is redeeming — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until he had enough personal distance
Charlene on Fanon, ontological Blackness, and the Cone she wanted to recapture — the one who was talking about the rats in the communities, not just the interpersonal dynamics of race
Victor Anderson: the gay, postmodern scholar hurt by the Black church who cleared room in Black theology for everyone with a constellation of experiences like his
The Niebuhr question Charlene had been sitting with since the seminar: whether the Cecil-and-Jim and Richard-and-Reinhold parallelism was something Cone never talked about in public — and Gary saying yes, and then saying more than he’d ever said before
Why Niebuhr never risked anything for a Black person — and Gary’s argument about Lutheran false righteousness that Cone heard, acknowledged, and then declined to include in The Cross and the Lynching Tree
Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ferguson, and the night Gary walked behind a student holding a sign that said “James Cone was right”
How Black Lives Matter revived Cone as a teacher — and the retirement letter he ripped up
Charlene’s grandson, trembling, saying he didn’t want to die — and the question she’s still staying up at night trying to answer
Jim’s final word to white people who want to be in solidarity: “Try to be one of the white people who don’t ask Black people to take care of you or make you feel better”

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