James Cone and the Demands of Love: Cornel West and Gary Dorrien Live at Theology Beer Camp

Cornel West and Gary Dorrien are next-door neighbors, and for a long stretch they were James Cone's closest colleagues at Union. Put them on a stage in Kansas City with Adam Clark, one of the many students Cone and Gary trained, and you get a conversation nobody else could have. Adam opened with a question aimed straight at our process-heavy crowd. When Cone arrived at Union in 1969, a year after King was killed, the school's leading process theologian, Daniel Day Williams, had just published The Spirit and the Forms of Love. So what did Cone's arrival reveal about theologies that made love central while leaving Black suffering at the margins?

Gary says he wasn't expecting to start there, and then gives an hour of the most intimate Cone stories you'll hear anywhere: the loneliness of his early Union years, the friendship with Paul Lehmann, the annotated copy of Heilbroner that Cone read twice, and their last conversation before he died. Cornel brings the blues. Begin with catastrophe, not problems. Pharaoh is on both sides of the Red Sea. And the spirituals made Daniel the hero, not Moses. Along the way: Cone and socialism (including a meeting with Michael Harrington and Irving Howe that Cornel calls a disaster), the move from Exodus to Job when liberation no longer seemed imminent, whether opposing white supremacy is still the test of Christian credibility, and where to find a politics of liberation now. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube.

Join us at Theology Beer Camp 2027: Sign up at ⁠theologybeer.camp⁠ for updates on TBC 2027. You'll be the first to hear the dates and location and get pre-sale tickets at the cheapest rate.

⁠⁠⁠Join me in Berlin for the Bonhoeffer Travel Learning Trip⁠⁠⁠

In June 2027, Andy Root and I are leading two Rise of Bonhoeffer travel-learning weeks. The Seminar (June 12–17) reads Bonhoeffer’s sources where they were fought over — Luther in Wittenberg, Schleiermacher and Barth in Berlin, the prison letters in his own house. The Pilgrimage (June 17–22) is for pastors and faith leaders, built around Bonhoeffer as a working minister in a time of resistance. Twenty-two seats each, back to back so you can do one or both. Early bird pricing through January 31. ⁠⁠⁠Details and registration at www.BonhoefferTrip.com⁠⁠⁠

UPCOMING ONLINE ADVENT CLASS: Tear Open the Heavens: Advent for Indifferent Strangers

Most of us are running faster just to stay in place, and the one season that asks us to wait gets swallow