Seminars

By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse. This article is an important section of my overall book manuscript, titled Black Irreligious: James Cone and the Affects and Aesthetics of Black Religious Radicalism, which is about the making and mood of modern Black religious radicalism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This is the first chapter of my Dissertation, Borderlands Miracles: Pentecostal and Catholic Missionary Encounters in the Mexico/US Borderlands, 1914-1928. As you can see, this chapter is not about Pentecostal missionaries, but about their spiritual predecessors. In it, I situate the early white Pentecostal missionary fixation on converting Hispanic Catholics, and eventually the Latin American world, in a particular kind of anti-Catholic missionary drive in late-Victorian evangelicals. Essentially, I am trying to answer why early Pentecostals (the Assemblies of God in particular) worked so hard in the period in question to convert Mexican people in the American Southwest. At the same time, I am laying out what conversion meant for these missionaries and the actual means by which they effected them. To make the long story short, I think that miracles--learning when and how to experience them in oneself and others--had a lot to do with it.

In the contemporary USA, the freedom of speech is typically understood as a constitutional value: a liberty “guaranteed” by the First Amendment that empowers citizens to uphold democracy and the rule of law. Yet this Constitution- centric definition conceals as much as it clarifies since, over the past four centuries, many Americans have defined and defended free speech in non-constitutionalist terms. For the Puritan settlers who arrived in New England in the 1620s, free speech was closely connected with the freedom of conscience. It meant saying what was on one’s mind: always with God’s help, and often in defiance of civil authority. Even amid the enthusiasm for constitutionalism and civil liberties that effervesced among the British colonists starting in the early eighteenth century, Black and Indigenous intellectuals continued to defend free speech in terms of conscience, not law. These marginalized thinkers were victims, not beneficiaries of Anglo-American constitutionalism; their liberty to speak out against the imperial hegemon could not plausibly be derived from Britain’s “ancient” constitution or, later, the USA’s written version. Amid the nineteenth- and twentieth-century “legalization” of free speech in the domain of constitutional law, disenfranchised Americans continued to conceptualize their freedom to speak in non-legalistic ways, deriving it from conscience, or Divine inspiration, or human agency itself—what Frederick Douglass called “moral power.”