James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing
Homebrewed ChristianityShow Notes
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 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.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp
ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity
More from Homebrewed Christianity
Paul Hoard is back — solo this time, since Michael Morelli is off doing something in Canada that surely involves hockey and maple syrup — and he came on to witness to me in the name of Lacan. Here’s the setup: I collect Lacanian friends and have a running bit where I refuse to actually read Lacan, purely to irritate them. Paul teaches counseling psychology at the Seattle School, blends two schools of psychoanalysis that mostly don’t get along, and has published an academic article about Lacan and board games with an organization called the Board Game Academics, which — delightfully — exists. What we got is the best introduction to psychoanalysis I’ve had on this show. The masters-of-suspicion move isn’t a critique of your beliefs from outside. It’s the observation that desire preceded your beliefs, and if you never do the work of looking at what’s actually driving you, something foreign to you is going to be running the show. We went through Freud’s Last Session, the real/imaginary/symbolic explained through chess, disgust as the engine of both MAGA politics and progressive purity tests, Jesus as a contaminant, and then my running worry that the algorithm has colonized the last remaining territory — human interiority. Paul had answers I didn’t expect. Also: my ongoing three-year campaign to get Five Iron Frenzy to Theology Beer Camp continues.
This is the final Q&A of the class, and the story doesn’t end where the book did. Christ and Empire came out in 2007, right before Obama was elected and a lot of people decided empire wasn’t our problem anymore. Then came 2016, and everyone started worrying about empire again. Joerg’s last lecture brought the whole thing into the present: Christian nationalism, the white Christ, and a president posting himself in white robes. He also pushed past the easy targets, because the hard empire is always the easiest one to see. Your questions pulled the whole six-week arc together: the Christological surplus, deep solidarity, and a doctrine of God that starts with the day laborer instead of Caesar. We covered twenty questions in about eighty minutes, and I think it’s the best one yet.
This is the fifth live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep in which Joerg and I got to Friedrich Schleiermacher: the father of liberal theology, the DNA of American mainline Christianity, and yes, a card in my theologian baseball card collection. (Joerg wants to trade for it. Negotiations are ongoing.) Joerg started by saying this session isn't meant to make anyone in the liberal tradition feel bad. It's an invitation to dig deeper. There's plenty worth celebrating here, like the leveling of old hierarchies, thinking for yourself, and Christ working by attraction instead of coercion. But Schleiermacher also wrote that "we are the miracle," fantasized about colonies Prussia didn't have, and called Judaism "charming." That's where the soft empire hides, and it's the version American liberals find hardest to see in the mirror. The surplus is still there, and the work is ours.
Kristin Du Mez signed the contract for this book about a week before Beth Moore tweeted about Jesus and John Wayne, and that book took on a life of its own inside evangelical spaces. Then January 6th happened. So she wrote Live Laugh Love while still very much living inside the Jesus and John Wayne moment, which is partly her excuse for why it took so much longer than agreed — the other excuse being that once she started tracing what white Christian women were actually reading, buying, and building their lives around, she discovered she had to remap twentieth-century American religion. The neat boxes break down. Fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic, mainline, Mormon, secular wellness — the women's cultural products cross all of them, and the through-line running underneath is New Thought. Here's the payoff that stopped me: what gets sold today as biblical womanhood traces back through Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman to Helen Andelin's Fascinating Womanhood to a set of 1920s booklets published by a New Thought press. They just added Bible verses to the top. We also got into the Amway tour, the rules against negativity, why toxic empathy makes perfect sense once you see the system, and — at the end — what she learned studying the German Christian movement that she cannot stop thinking about now. She's at Beer Camp in a few weeks.
This is the fourth live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, and this week we're in the Americas with Bartolomé de las Casas — Joerg's pick over Martin Luther for the Reformation-era chapter, and the hinge of the whole course. Here's why. Las Casas owned an encomienda. He had Native people working for him. He was, in Joerg's words, a slave driver. Then he woke up, gave the land away, freed the people, and spent the rest of his life arguing against the conquest. Gustavo Gutiérrez read him as a precursor to liberation theology, and when Joerg got into the sources, he thought: not so fast. Because what Las Casas actually represents is the pivot from empire hard to empire soft — from fire and sword to kindness and charity, which is nicer, preferable, and still empire. The whole session is about learning to tell soft empire from the way of Christ when they look almost identical. We got the charity/advocacy/solidarity distinction, the flip on anthropology (not others are like us but what if I were like them), why converting from one God to another is harder than converting from no God at all, why land back needs labor back alongside it, and Joerg's answer to the flag-wrapped warrior Christ, which is two words long.