Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Cornel West is coming to Theology Beer Camp with his neighbor, Gary Dorrien, this October, and this hour is the on-ramp. It also happens to be a full one-hour preview of the America 250 conversation every clergy person I know is currently trying to write a sermon around. Brother West walked us through 1776 as an interruption of empire that was itself built on the preconditions of Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement (not the moral lapses around the edges of the founding — the actual foundation of it); through James Baldwin on how a country can be guilty of its own innocence; through the walking nihilism, the decline of courage, and the syncretism with economism that F. O. Matthiessen, Solzhenitsyn, Christopher Lasch, and Byung-Chul Han diagnosed long before the algorithm made it worse; and through why the Black Christian tradition rescued a love-centered gospel that Protestant faith-obsession had quietly abandoned. The whole thing wraps at Richard Rorty, Walter Rauschenbusch's grandson, at the end of his life confessing his utopia was a world in which love is the only law. Cornel: it sounds very Rauschenbuschian to me, Brother Rorty. If you want thein-person hang and conversation with Gary, register for Theology Beer Camp 2026 in Kansas City, October 8–10. Cornel and Gary have been trying to steal away for coffee for fifty years. Come watch them get to keep going.
www.TheologyBeer.Camp
Cornel West is coming to Theology Beer Camp with his neighbor, Gary Dorrien, this October, and this hour is the on-ramp. It also happens to be a full one-hour preview of the America 250 conversation every clergy person I know is currently trying to write a sermon around. Brother West walked us through 1776 as an interruption of empire that was itself built on the preconditions of Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement (not the moral lapses around the edges of the founding — the actual foundation of it); through James Baldwin on how a country can be guilty of its own innocence; through the walking nihilism, the decline of courage, and the syncretism with economism that F. O. Matthiessen, Solzhenitsyn, Christopher Lasch, and Byung-Chul Han diagnosed long before the algorithm made it worse; and through why the Black Christian tradition rescued a love-centered gospel that Protestant faith-obsession had quietly abandoned. The whole thing wraps at Richard Rorty, Walter Rauschenbusch's grandson, at the end of his life confessing his utopia was a world in which love is the only law. Cornel: it sounds very Rauschenbuschian to me, Brother Rorty. If you want thein-person hang and conversation with Gary, register for Theology Beer Camp 2026 in Kansas City, October 8–10. Cornel and Gary have been trying to steal away for coffee for fifty years. Come watch them get to keep going.
www.TheologyBeer.Camp
