Rethinking Black Rage in and with James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power

Abstract

By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse.

Repository attribution: Xavier Pickett. Rethinking Black Rage in and with James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power. Religions, 16(6), issue year 2025; article page publication date 2025-05-26. Original: source article. DOI: 10.3390/rel16060675. Original PDF reproduced without changes under CC BY 4.0. No endorsement is implied. Copyright 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/