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While most associate Memorial Church with Sunday morning services and painfully-early morning bells, last Tuesday night featured a different sort of event in the sanctuary: a debate about...
...weeks ago, after his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, first drew headlines for his fiery sermons, Barack Obama responded with a graceful speech on race in America. But Rev. Wright has decided he isn't about to shut up and launched a series of provocative remarks over the weekend and on Monday. On Tuesday afternoon, Obama denounced Wright, saying "His comments were not only divisive... but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate." The candidate added, "Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright...
...There he was introduced to black liberation theology, which in the late 1960s was emerging as a more rigorous, if not radical, reevaluation of the role of African Americans in the country's history, with the church as confessional, refuge and bully pulpit. Much of it was a reaction to the Black Power Movement and the Nation of Islam, which questioned the compatibility of blackness with Christianity. "Blacks coming out of the '60s were no longer ashamed of being black people, nor did they have to apologize for being Christian. Because many persons in the African-American community were teasing...
...Wright became head of Trinity, a church on a hardscrabble strip of Chicago's South Side with barely 90 members. The church adopted the slogan "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." A light-brown-skinned man with an Afro, Wright regularly wore dashikis, and laced his Sunday sermons with a level of political rhetoric that over the years has often proved too political for some African Americans. Nevertheless, Trinity's congregation grew to some 8,000 (Oprah Winfrey and the rapper Common have attended services there). Wright's prominence in Chicago soon gained him national attention and won him entry into...
...Wright retired from his weekly preaching duties in March. Almost simultaneously, the controversy began. Since then his life has been threatened, as has his church. The media barrage was so intense that some reporters apparently called a hospice in an attempt to speak to a dying Trinity member. And so Wright made up his mind to talk. When he got to the NPC, he had a receptive congregation waiting for him. Many of the people "Amen-ing" were attendees at a two-day conference for black theologians and not journalists, who were largely stuck in the balcony. "I know...