# James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917/james-cone-was-right-gary-dorrien-charlene-sinclair-on-black-theology-the-lynching-tree-the-cry-we-keep-not-hearing
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917/james-cone-was-right-gary-dorrien-charlene-sinclair-on-black-theology-the-lynching-tree-the-cry-we-keep-not-hearing.md
Podcast: [Homebrewed Christianity](https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917)
Published: 2026-05-16T07:20:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NAANT7816801601.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NAANT7816801601.mp3
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Duration seconds: 5168

## Resource

Week five of Theology for Troublemakers, and we finally got to James Cone — which meant we got to Charlene Sinclair, and I want you to know that the moment Gary introduced her on this call was one of the more moving things we've done in this class. He described her as the student who told Cone she saw something in his early work that nobody else gets — the importance of Fanon to his concept of ontological Blackness — and the way he described the day she defended her dissertation, how he held his one point until the very end so he could announce that this dissertation had explained, like no book ever written, what Fanon actually meant to Cone's thought, tells you everything about who James Cone was as a teacher and who Charlene Sinclair is as a scholar. We started at the beginning: the three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power — the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning, and the assassination of King — and why Cone said bottled rage would have killed him if he hadn't written that book. Gary walked us through the satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim versus a racial one, what ontological Blackness actually meant, and why Cone's sweeping indictment of the Negro church before 1968 was, as Gary put it, seriously flawed even as it produced a towering theology. We got into the womanist challenge — Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing there is nothing redeeming in the cross — and why Cone couldn't start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until Delores retired and Emily Towns went to Yale; he needed just enough personal distance to think it through. Then Charlene took us somewhere unexpected on Niebuhr: she asked, quietly, whether there wasn't a personal parallel between the Niebuhr brothers and the Cone brothers — Richard the…

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