Thinking for the Sake of Thinking
With no apparent connection, two scholarly books reveal how established fields of study dealt with the push for racial revolution.
By Angela P. Dodson
Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power
by Dwight N. Hopkins (Editor), $24.95,
Paperback, Baylor University Press
(August 2007), ISBN-10: 1602580138, ISBN-13: 978-1602580138, 262 pp.
by Stephen Steinberg, $17.95, Paperback, Stanford University Press (September 2007), ISBN-10: 080475327X, ISBN-13: 978-0804753272, 208 pp.
It is merely a coincidence that these two books landed on my desk at the same time and that I read them in tandem. The more I read, the more similarities I saw and the more challenged I was by the ideas set forth.
Dr. Dwight N. Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago, edited nine essays by a roster of thinkers, including but not limited to theologians. The collection grew out of a University of Chicago conference, “Black Theology as Public Discourse: From Retrospect to Prospect,” held in April 1998 in anticipation of the 30th anniversary of the publication of James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power.
Three decades ago, Cone’s premise was that Christianity had failed to be Christian in its dealings with the Black and poor of the world and that it had evaded the mandate to seek justice and had aided/abetted White domination.
In Race Relations: A Critique, Dr. Stephen Steinberg, a professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, wrote a provocative analysis of how the field of sociology, specifically its branch on “race relations,” has dealt with, or mostly not dealt with, obvious racism and oppression in the last century or so.
As Steinberg paraphrases a comment made to him by the late, great economist Gunnar Myrdal, “What did sociology do while Rome burned?”
