Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader
West is extremely prolific. I give some quotations, with page references, of
themes linked to our reading. 


"My Checkhovian Christian conception of what it means to be modern focuses on the
night side of modernity, the underside of our contemporary predicament.""Xviii

"Black people became Christians for intellectual, existential and political
reasons. Christianity is, as Nietzsche has taught us..., a religion especially
fitted to the oppressed. It looks at the world from the perspective of those
below." 62

"The notion that black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in
the modern West." 70

"I find existential sustenance in many of the narratives in the biblical
scriptures as interpreted by streams in the Christian heritage; and I see
political relevance in the biblical focus on the plight of the wretched of the
earth." 170

"The severing of ties to churches, synagogues, temples and mosques by the left
intelligentsia is tantamount to political suicide." 172

"Nietzsche is the central figure in postmodern thought in the West." 189

"We are not dancing on Nietzsche's texts here and talking about nihilism;
we are in a nihilism that is lived. We are talking about real obstacles to
the sustaining of a people..... What we have... is... a meaninglessness so
well understood that it can result in the taking of one's own life." 293

"The God of history who sides with the oppressed and the exploited, a God who
accents and affirms one's own humanity in a society that is attacking and
assaulting black intelligence and black beauty and black moral character... this
message spoke very deeply at the level of meaning and value." 297

"There are two organic intellectual traditions in Afro-American life:
the black Christian tradition of preaching and the black musical tradition of
performance." 306

On meeting with some alienated teen-agers:
"I remember feeling totally helpless. I had no recipe to heal these open wounds.
The only thing I could think of doing was to bow before the enormity of his
misery...." 339

"I have to recognize deep homophobia inside of me, because I grew up in the black
community, in the black church, on the black block, and there's a lot of
homophobia in all three sites." 403  

"Martin Luther King, Jr., was the most significant and successful organic
intellectual in American history." 426 

"The black church put forward perspectives that encouraged both individuality and
community fellowship, personal morality and antiracist political engagement, a
grace-centered piety and a stress on Christian good works." 428 

"The trauma of the slave voyage from Africa to the New World and the
Euro-American attempt systematically to strip Africans of their languages,
cultures and religions produced a black experience of the absurd." 435

"Black people do not attend churches, for the most part, to find God, but rather
to share and expand together the rich heritage they have inherited.... The common
black argument for belief in God is not that it is logical or reasonable, but
rather that such belief is requisite for one's sanity and for entrée to
the most uplifting sociality available in the black community." 437 

"Afro-American Christianity promotes a gospel that empowers black people to
survive and struggle in a God-forsaken world." 439

"As a philosopher, I'm fundamentally concerned with how we confront death, dread,
despair, disappointment and disease." 543