By J. Kameron Carter<\/p>\n
How should suffering, loss, and pain be understood? And I mean here not just personal pain, but societally and religiously inflicted pain, that pain and suffering that\u2019s most within our control. Can the lives broken on the shores and smashed against the rocks of social sin be redeemed? In short, is a just society possible? Which is to ask (and here I allude to ole Jimmy\u2014Jimmy Baldwin, that is), can injustice be checkmated?<\/p>\n
Professor James H. Cone in his latest book The Cross and the Lynching (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011) takes up these questions at a double-scene of subjection, which by the time he\u2019s done in this quite readable and well-paced work proves to be really one scene of subjection. This is the scene of the old rugged, Christian Cross, or the doctrinal site of Jesus\u2019 death, on the one hand, and the lynching tree, or at the numerous fields of blood that have marked the history of the United Stated with a crimson stain, on the other. If Professor Cone\u2019s basic concern when he published Black Theology and Black Power a little over 40 years ago in the wake of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s assassination was to diagnosis the religious dimensions of the American sickness unto death that lead to King\u2019s assassination and that has afflicted America\u2019s soul since its inception, then with this book Professor Cone provides his latest statement on the contorted Christian imagination that produced America\u2019s societal sickness. The problem lay with the Christian symbol of the Cross of Jesus Christ. More specifically\u2014and this is what Professor Cone in effect calls us to think about in this book\u2014it is with the way social sacrifice has been ideologically deployed right next to, indeed right inside of, talk of a \u201cChristian America,\u201d rhetoric about \u201ca city on a hill,\u201d and language about \u201csaving America,\u201d language that closely echoes language about death in the Christian traditions, the death of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n