Debates Afrocentric and Eurocentric, Remote and Recent

Carlin Romano,"Lefkowitz Agonistes: a Contemporary Odyssey," CHE, 28 March, reviews Mary Lefkowitz's History Lesson: A Race Odyssey and, in doing so, revisits one of the most important and heated historical controversies of the 1990s. It began with Lefkowitz's review of Martin Bernal's Black Athena and raised profound questions about certainty and problematic knowledge in the face of limited evidence about the ancient Mediterranean world.

At Religion in American History, Jon Pahl's"The Lynching of Jeremiah Wright," 20 March, led to an interesting discussion between the University of South Alabama's John Turner and San Diego State's Edward Blum about the degree of irresponsibility in Jeremiah Wright's preaching. Elsewhere, on that subject, have a look at Augean Stables by Boston University's Richard Landes. There's much that Landes and I would not agree on; and he wouldn't be among the experts I'd think to consult about African American preaching.

But I recommend Landes,"The Prophetic Stream, Conspiracy Theory and Paranoia: What's Wrong with African American Preaching," Augean Stables, 23 March, for its provocation. Landes's interest in millennial studies led to an interesting engagement with a panel of hip hop artists who believed and an unnamed African American scholar who refused to deny believing in some of the myths that circulate in the African American community. Some of them get circulated from the pulpit that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright formerly occupied at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Even its smoother current pastor, Otis Moss, III, [think pulpit transition from Vernon Johns to Martin Luther King, Jr.] has avoided repudiating those myths.

Lest Landes and Mark Steyn cudgel Barack Obama yet one more time with his former pastor without reply, take a look at Rod Parsley of Columbus, Ohio's World Harvest Church. Here, he's preaching to his bi-racial congregation about"Black Genocide":

There's more, if you care to see it. Parsley claims, for instance, that it is America's obligation to destroy Islam. Needless to say, he's put his network of Patriot Pastors at the service of John McCain's campaign for President. The African American pulpit has no monopoly on rhetorical excess that plays on racial fears.