When I was in Princeton with Amelia, aka Leigh, we stopped in a bookstore. She asked if I knew who Cornel West was and of course I did not. Well, he was in the same bookstore as we were! He was wearing his signature outfit -- according to Leigh, he wears the same thing every day (as seen on the cover of this book). I looked him up and he's quite the distinguished gentleman: tenured at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, where he currently teaches. In addition to teaching and writing, he also has at least two rap albums out and was featured in the last two Matrix movies. I guess you could say he's pretty talented.
Anyway, I decided to read one of his books and just finished reading Democracy Matters. Yes, I had to skim through parts. No, I didn't agree with everything he said. Then again, when do you agree with everything someone says? I found him to be interesting and passionate. I would LOVE to hear him speak sometime. And someday I want to read his memoir.
We long for a politics that is not about winning a political game but about producing better lives (64). Agreed.
The uninspiring nature of our nationa political culture has only enhanged he seductiveness of the pursuit of pleasure and of diverting entertainments, and too many of us have turned inward to a disconnected, narrowly circumscribed family and social life. White suburbanites and middle-class blacks (and others) are preoccupied with the daily pursuit of the comfort of their material lives. In many cases they literally wall themselves off into comfortable communities, both physical and social, in which they can safely avert their eyes from the ugly realities that afflict so many of our people. Because they are able to buy the cars and take the vacations they want, they are all too willing to either disregard the political and social dysfunctions afflicting the country or accept facile explanations for them (65). Agreed. And I am guilty of doing so.
I speak as a Christian -- one whose commitment to democray is very deep but whose Christian convictions are even deeper. Democracy is not my faith. And American democracy is not my idol. To see the Gospel of Jesus Christ bastardized by imperial Christians and pulverized by Constantinian blievers and then exploited by nihilistic elites of the American empire makes my blood boil. To be a Christian -- a follower of Jesus Christ -- is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. This is the radical love in Christian freedom and the radical freedom in Christian love embraces Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope. If Christians do not exemplify this love and freedom, then we side with the nihilists of the Roman empire (cowardly elite Romans and subjugated Jews) who put Jesus to a humiliating death. Instead of receiving his love in freedom as a life-enhancing gift of grace, we end up believing in the idols of the empire that nailed him to the cross. I do not want to be numbered among those who sold their souls for a mess of pottage -- who surrendered their democratic Christian identity for a comfortable place at the table of the American empire while, like Lazarus, the least of these cried out and I was too intoxicated with worldly power and might to hear, beckon, and heed their cries. To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, and freely -- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic Christian identity in the age of the American empire (172). Beautiful. This is why I would love to hear him speak. Because even if I hated everything that came out of his mouth, I believe that I would be intrigued and would still have much respect for him.
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