The two persons become united as one when you read this account from American Thinker of Jeremiah Wright's theological inspiration -- Dr. James Cone -- whose book Black Theology & Black Power was highlighted on the Trinity Church website (until late last year) "as required reading for Trinity parishioners who wished to more thoroughly understand the church's theology and mission." The great influence of his life reveals Wright as an intellectual with a deeply Manichean view of the world, one in which white America represents the great force of darkness and devastation in the world and Black Christianity represents the great force of light and hope. It is a near impossibility that Barack Obama would have failed to be aware of this overarching theological structure in Jeremiah Wright's ministry. Indeed, you can easily imagine Wright's sophisticated anti-American/European Manicheanism appealing to the Barack Obama who wrote this:
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake,we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.Finally, here's Obama's account of his encounter with Jeremiah Wright and his sermon "The Audacity of Hope":
The title of Reverend Wright's sermon that morning was "The Audacity of Hope." He began with a passage from the Book of Samuel--the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.
"The painting depicts a harpist," Reverend Wright explained, "a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.
"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere...That's the world! On which hope sits!"
And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The reverend spoke of the hardship that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worrying about paying the light bill...
UPDATE: The NY Times interviews James Cone as part of its story on Barack Obama's denunciation of Jeremiah Wright's hate speech against white people and America. Quotable: "If you're black, it's hard to say what you truly think and not upset white people."
UPDATE II: Here's the text of Wright's "The Audacity of Hope", along with the painting which is the theme of the sermon. Note well that the painting Wright cites differs discernibly from Wright's description of it.