The Critical Cleric

James Cone and Anthony Pinn Lecture and Dialogue about Theology, Liberation and Humanism

James Hal Cone & Anthony B. Pinn from Revolution Books on Vimeo.

 

Selective Memory and My Top 5 MLK Books

Last week while watching the Boston Celtics compete against the Oklahoma Thunder I was reminded that despite the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. is arguably the most celebrated non-elected US citizen in the history of the United States of America there continues to be a general public ignorance about many important aspects of his life.

This fact became apparent as I listened to a TNT basketball analyst rattle off what he termed as “lesser known facts about Dr. King”. These so-called “lesser known facts” were well documented details of Dr. King’s life such as his being a PhD student at Boston University in the early 195o’s and his later migration back to the South to pastor an Alabama church.

Admittedly, my initial thought in response to these facts was “uh, I’m sorry sir, but on what planet are these lesser known facts?” I thought to myself “everybody and their cousin and their grandmother know that Dr. King was a PhD student at Boston University before he became pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama. But then I began to think about the diverse viewing audience of a NBA game and I remembered that the vast majority of the general public has very little knowledge of the intellectual and cultural forces that shaped MLK into an American civic hero.

To the average American, their knowledge of Dr. Martin Luther King begins with the fact that he was a Southern preacher who delivered the “I Have A Dream” speech at a civil rights march in Washington and it ends with him being assassinated in Memphis five years later. Though these facts are certainly important to the life of Dr. King they do not, however, help people understand the forces that shaped Dr. King’s intellectual and moral formation. As a result, we have a significant segment of society that celebrates the life of a man that in reality they know very little about. To be sure, this type of myopic biographical admiration is not unique to Dr. King. For example, many studies have shown that though 8 out of 10 Americans profess to be Christians (followers of Christ), the vast majority of these same Americans have very little knowledge or understanding of the person and work of the historical Jesus whom they profess to follow. Which begs the question, who and/or what really is the foundation of the faith that American Christians profess to follow? And, in like manner, who is the true Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that Americans profess to cherish?

As a student of the life and thought Dr. Martin King Jr., I think it is very important that US citizens understand the true essence of the man that many believe is the “greatest American ever produced on American soil”. So in an effort to be helpful to those who may be interested I have produced my list of the top 5 books written on the life and thought of Dr. Martin Luther King. Let me be clear, I am in no way suggesting that these texts are the best books written in the history of all writing on MLK. Believe me; I would never be so presumptuous. So before someone gets upset that I omitted their favorite King book that they read in college or that their uncle wrote or something, please remember that this is simply MY list of favorites. Nothing more and nothing less. 

1) The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume I/

 Called To Serve, January 1929-June 1951. I recommend this work first because it provides a great basis for the familial and adolescent development of King. It contains a detailed account of his family’s history in Atlanta and their historical connection to the Ebenezer Baptist church. But the most important feature of this resource is that it chronicles the original letters and papers of young Martin King from his days at Morehouse College to his days at Crozer Theological Seminary. I consider this indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding King as a thinker and minister.

2) Martin Luther King Jr. for Armchair Theologians/
 This book is a part of the armchair theologian series which is a collection of texts that feature the thought of a famous theologian as understood by a contemporary religious scholar. This book that features the thought of MLK is written by seminary professor Rufus Burrow whose work specializes in theological social ethics. The great benefit of this book is its accessibility and reader friendly composition (it even has pictures). In fact, I imagine most folks could read this entire book fairly quickly and at the conclusion have a general understanding of the substratum of King’s theology and thought.

3) I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr./
This book has been heralded as one of the most important texts written on the life of MLK. Penned by the famed professor and social critic Michael Eric Dyson this book is a collection of extended critical essays on the life of Dr. King. Upon its release this book was greeted with a mixed reception due to the fact that it contained detailed accounts of King’s extra-marital sexual affairs and his alleged same gender sexual encounter. In my assessment, Dyson has provided a wonderful MLK biographical book of social and cultural criticism that helps readers view the life of King from the context of our current contemporary moment. I highly recommend this book for individuals who have the courage to engage both the blessings and the banes of the life of MLK.

4) King Among Theologians/
 This was the first book I read that took seriously the fact that King was an actual theologian. In this unique book, Dr. Noel Erskine (a former professor of mine) compares and contrasts the theology of MLK to the theologies of Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, James Cone, and a few womanist theologians. For the student of theology this book will be a treat. For others this book will be an important window into the mind of Dr. King as a religious thinker and scholar. However, I would recommend that readers who are not students of theology read King For Armchair Theologians before they read Erskine’s text so that might gain a better understanding of the concepts and language.

5) Martin & Malcolm & America/
I debated whether or not to include this last text on this list, mostly because the book is not primarily about the life of MLK. Rather, the legendary theologian Dr. James Cone sought in this book to compare and contrast the southern integrationist rhetorical strategies of Dr. King with the northern separatist ideology of Malcolm X. Though this book is about both Martin and Malcolm I contend it can be a pivotal resource for those seeking to understand some of the challenges and limitations of King’s thought. In particular, it can help readers understand the Black Nationalist critiques of King that were pervasive during his life and in fact still endure to this day.

Okay, that’s my list. I hope it’s helpful.

Compassionately and Critically yours, Billy Michael Honor

New Life and The Power of Great Preaching by Dr. Ralph Watkins

(The dissemination of encouragement is a powerful thing, especially when you are the recipient.  So let's just say I'm feeling empowered today.  Yesterday, our congregation was blessed to have Rev. Dr. Ralph Watkins (Associate Professor of Evangelism and Church Growth at Columbia Theological Seminary) and his wife join us in worship.  Though I have followed the work of Dr. Watkins for years now, I hadn't been given the opportunity to meet him until about 6 days ago when I was invited to preach at Columbia Seminary.  During these brief several days knowing Dr. Watkins what's clear is his sincere love and enthusiasm for God and God's Church and his commendable willingness to encourage young preachers like myself.  Evidence of this fact is his recent blog post about his visit to our church in which he shares positive insights about his experience.  Because his words encouraged me so much I thought I might share them with you as we continue our endeavor to promote pastoral scholarship and organic Christian intellectualism.  Read and Enjoy!  Blessings, Billy Michael Honor) 

--This blog post is from the site It's The Church facilitated by Rev. Dr. Ralph Watkins  

  The Power of Great Preaching

As our search for a church home in Atlanta continues this Sunday we visited New Life Presbyterian Church where the Rev. Billy Honor is the pastor.  Rev. Honor is young enough to be my son but today he preached like he was my father.  I needed a word from God in the worse way.  The transition from California to Georgia hasn’t been easy.  Sunday is a time for revival and key to any revival is great preaching.

What I learned today was when a pastor / preacher is prepared and they have prayed hard, studied long and put quality work into their sermon it shows.  When preaching makes you think and shout simultaneously that is when preaching is at it’s best.  Rev. Honor engaged culture and theology with perfect harmony and put the text in conversation with popular culture, personal struggle and God’s vision for God’s people.

When preaching is great it has the potential to grow a people, glorify God and actually grow a church.  Preaching with excellence elevates the entire worship experience and moves the congregation in ways that shows the power the Holy Spirit.   Rev. Honor is brilliant and he has been well trained. A mature, intelligent God led pastor makes a difference.  The future of the church is good hands.  Vanessa and I will be seeing New Life Presbyterian Church and Rev. Honor again!  Preach preacher. 

New Life Presbyterian Church of Atlanta: Learn, Connect, Serve!!!!

 

A Charge To Pastor From Seminary Professor & Ideological Critic Randall C. Bailey

(This is a revised version of the charge Rev. Dr. Randall Bailey presented at my Ordination and Installation service this past Sunday. I hope it inspires someone who reads it. Critically and compassionately yours, Billy Michael Honor)

 
I charge you to be faithful to the liberating Gospel of Jesus Christ and to help others to be nourished in this understanding through the best of the Black religious traditions.

I charge you to take seriously the ravages of the corporate sins of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, ethnocentrism, and all other forms of oppression and internalized oppression, helping the congregation to become aware of these and to develop skills of resistance to the oppressive forms.

I charge you to be active in community struggles, bearing witness to God's love for the world and thereby being a sign and symbol of Emmanuel, God with us in times of trouble, standing with the least of these.

I charge you to take seriously the ministry of presence as expressed in visits to congregants in times of joy and in times of sorrow. Continue to develop a listening ear so you can be an effective pastoral counselor to those going through shadowy valleys and climbing mounts of transfiguration.

I further charge you to continue your education, reading materials which will sharpen your analyses of the world around us and the spirit within us. As you do so, share with others through formal Christian Education venues, blogs, and other forms of social media, being mindful that pictures of yourself are not necessary to get the messages across.

I charge you to take care of yourself, physically and emotionally, and to keep close those who love, nurture and support you in your career & personal development. Also, always find the time to nurture and support others with whom you share your life, whether they be family, friends, spouse and/or children.

I also charge you to keep a healthy sense of humor. 

I also charge you to preach in powerful and liberating ways, bringing to the pulpit strong spiritual power, immersed in social justice, contoured by sharp intellectual and hermeneutical insights, engaging cultural criticism, pointing always to Jesus, who wants us to be responsible agents of his love and promise to always keep our back.

Randall Bailey, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Interdenominational Theological Center

June 1st and A Life of Love, Art, and Inspiration

 

I’ve always thought that one can choose to view the day that commemorates their birth into the world as an annual event of regression or progression.  This is to say that we can view getting older as an opportunity to remember how we used to be or it can be an opportunity to envision what we have yet to become. Personally, I choose the latter.  Call it whatever you may, whether it be youthful optimism or delusions grandeur, I still believe that the future has good things in store.  It is this hopefulness about the future that keeps me excited about life and getting older.  

Today is June 1^st 2011 and it has been exactly twenty-eight years since I was birthed into this world.  A whole lot has changed since 1983 and yet a lot remains the same.  One thing that remains the same is the truth that at the core of human experience is the reality of evolution.  Try as we might, it is nearly impossible to deny that a fundamental aspect of life is cultivating the growth of one’s self.  However, let’s be honest, the fact that it’s fundamental to life doesn’t make it an easy part of life.   Robert Stepto once wrote that “narratives of ascent are often narratives of alienation,” I interpret this to mean that the more we evolve, the more we have to leave behind.  This can often be a painful and nerve-wrecking process but nevertheless a necessary component of personal growth.

I’ve spent the greater balance of this day contemplating my own personal evolution and during this time I’ve come to several realizations about my life which can be summed up in three words: Art, Love and Inspiration.  As I sit in this familiar place of work and contemplation listening to the soothing sounds of John Coltrane and Duke Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood I am thoroughly aware of the role artistic expression plays in my life and evolution.  In fact, even as I write these words I am sporadically gazing at the bookshelf behind me that at times appears to be hovering over me like rows filled with a great class of witnesses.  In these rows sit literary titans such as Ralph Ellison
, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison and Bell Hooks.  There are intellectuals like WEB Dubois, Franz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, Harold Cruse, Shelby Steele, and Angela Davis. And there are religious luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Reinhold Niebuhr, Howard Thurman, Paul Tillich, Martin L. King Jr., and Karen Armstrong, to name a few. Through their various literary works these artist along with a host of musicians and spiritual leaders encourage and inspire me on days like this when I am most aware of the fleeting yet precious gift of life. 

Like so many, I am blessed with the love of family, friends, and an incredibly loving fiancée.  If it were not for the love of these precious folks I truly don’t know where I would be on this journey between womb and tomb; so I am indeed grateful for the gift of love for it is through love that I live, move, and have my being. 

In addition to love, I realize how profoundly I depend upon inspiration in my life.  I often seek this inspiration in the work and life’s witness of religious scholars, cultural critics, writers, public intellectuals, jazz musicians, and neo-soul artists both past and present.  In all of their contributions to culture and society I find my own personal sense of meaning and purpose in life.  From them I find inspiration to continue to teach, preach, write, and speak about the relationship of God, self, and the other in the complex matrix of human experience. 

It is with these three of life’s gifts that I boldly march into the days ahead.  And though I do not know totally what life has in store, be it days of joy and/or pain, what I know for sure is that it will be all worth it if I can look at myself and by the grace of God say “well done.”   

Compassionately and Contemplatively yours,

 Billy Michael Honor Jr.  

In Remembrance of Professor Manning Marable: An Interview with Charlie Rose on Race In America

 

Remembering ArchBishop Earl Paulk: Portrait of a Beautiful Mess (Repost)

 

(Two years ago today, ArchBishop Earl Paulk passed away. Though he died under a heap of scrutiny and controversy, I felt it necessary to remember some of his accomplishments as a religious leader; and the following post was my attempt to do so. I hope you enjoy.)  

I remember the day like it was yesterday.  It was a cold winter day in January 2002 and I had only been in Atlanta for about three weeks.  Some friends and I were in my new dorm house at the local bible college that I was attending doing what we overchurched aspiring ministry leaders did a lot back then; WATCH OTHER MINISTERS who were doing what we one day wanted to do.  Our ministerial voyeurism normally consisted of watching the same list of mainstream classical and neo Pentecostal ministers; these were individuals like T.D. Jakes, Noel Jones, Marvin Winans, Juanita Bynum, Iona Locke and Clarence McClendon etc. (all individuals I scarcely follow these days) This one particular day while we were watching some of  the usual suspects’, one of my friends noted that all of these ministers had come through “the cathedral” at some time or another.  I quickly asked him what and where is the cathedral?  He responded that it was Bishop Earl Paulk’s church The Cathedral at Chapel Hill over in Decatur (a suburb of Atlanta).  This was my first introduction to a man that I would come to learn and hear a lot about in the next several years that I would spend in the phoenix city of Atlanta.  The man I speak of is the now decease Archbishop Earl P. Paulk.     

On March 29, 2009 the Archbishop Earl P. Paulk (born May 30, 1927) died and hopefully entered the church triumphant after a long battle with cancer.  The name Paulk may be familiar to those who follow local Atlanta news or keep up with Christian tabloid reports.  He is the Atlanta Charismatic Archbishop who had been at the center of much controversy over the last ten plus years, all relating to alleged and proven sexual misconduct accusations rendered by former members of his Atlanta based mega church.  I will spare you the troubling details of these now banal and overstated congregational sex scandals.  Besides it seems almost inhumane in my thinking to continue to restate and reflect upon the shortcomings and personal mistakes of a person’s life before the individuals who loved and cared for that person have had time to celebrate the good of that person’s life.  I think this is a particularly salient point to consider when reflecting on the life of Archbishop Paulk.   For in truth Paulk’s life as a religious leader contains as much to laud as it does to lambaste.  And believe me I say this as one who has criticized Paulk with vigor and ashamedly with much humor over the years.  Having stated this clearly let me now turn to how I will remember Archbishop Paulk.

As aforementioned Paulk was the founder and bishop of 
Chapel Hill Harvester Church in Decatur, Georgia which probably means nothing to most readers of this blog.  However a brief history of the church will reveal that Chapel Hill Harvester Church was one of the country’s first influential independent megachurches.  Now in our current mega church driven, bigger is better Christian culture this does not seem like much of an accomplishment, but when one considers the time period and setting from which Paulk’s congregation emerged it becomes quite a different story.   

Paulk’s megachurch emerges during a time when Atlanta was still highly racially segregated as it relates to religious institutions.  However, despite this reality Paulk who formed his CHH church in 1960 with his wife persisted that his congregation should and would be an integrated church.  In fact, Paulk opened the doors of his church to all races when such a thing was still shunned among almost all white congregations in the metropolis of Atlanta.  The realities of religious racial segregation in Atlanta was so pronounced that Dr. King in a 1950’s interview on Meet the Press commented that there were no white members at Ebenezer Baptist church "not because they are not welcomed but because they will not come."  I should note that the religious racial segregation of Atlanta has not changed much in the last 40 years, even with the coming of the 1960’s civil right legislation.  I contend that Sunday morning at 11 is still the most racially segregated hour of the week.     

In addition to becoming one of the first racially integrated churches in Atlanta, Paulk’s Chapel Hill Harvester Church was also one of the first churches nationwide to incorporate with efficiency the combination of liturgical arts, such as dance and drama, with cutting-edge social ministry.  This is still an accomplishment that few churches can compare or rival.  Paulk saw the ministerial components of worship and social renewal as inseparable.  This point is accentuated in the fact that Paulk was often ridiculed as senior pastor of what is now Mount Paran Church of God for promoting racial integration and the rights of womens in ministry and worship.  It is also documented in his biography “The Provoker” that Paulk marched with Dr. King (of course what person over 60 doesn’t claim to have walked with Dr. King these days) and was a signer of the 1957 Atlanta manifesto which decried racial violence in Arkansas and other cities in America.   Also, his public housing ministry was named one of a "thousand points of light" by President George H. W. Bush. Paulk’s long history of racial justice advocacy in church and society is commendable especially when one considers the paucity of religious leaders black and white who have taken up the cause in Atlanta even until today.

 Lastly, I remember Archbishop Paulk not only as a racial justice advocate, and ministry practice innovator but also as a pastor to many pastors.  In 1982, Paulk was ordained as a bishop in the International Communion of Charismatic Church’s, which was a vibrant fellowship of self -described charismatic churches that sought to join themselves with the striving ministry of Paulk.  Highly visible ministry figures to the likes of
Carlton Pearson and Clarence McClendon have been associated and influenced by Paulk’s ICCC over the years.  In fact, few congregations have done more for the promotion of mainstream charismatic renewal than Paulk’s Cathedral at Chapel Hill. 

Despite the reality of the justifiable scrutiny which plagued Archbishop Paulk the last several years of his life up until his death, I contend he should be remembered with these positive accomplishments in mind.  For me Paulk like so many other figures in history will be remembered in tension as a person who exhibited in public life the capacity of humanity to be the conduit of both immense good and inexcusable chicanery.  This view enables me to remember Archbishop Earl Paulk as the complex and commendable beautiful mess that he was.

Compassionately and Critically yours, Billy Michael Honor

Carlton Pearson Speaks About His Resignation From Christ Universal Temple

Watch the full episode. See more Chicago Tonight.

 

Dr. West and Tavis Smiley Talk About the Arizona Shootings and the Legacy of MLK!

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