Cornel West to Take Job in New York (Union Theological Seminary)

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

Cornel West, the peripatetic public intellectual and political activist, plans to finish out a teaching career that has taken him from Yale to Harvard to Princeton by moving back this coming summer to Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, where he began as an assistant professor in 1977.

Dr. West, the author of 19 books, including “Race Matters,” and a ubiquitous television and radio commentator, said he was taking a significant pay cut to become a professor of philosophy and Christian practices at Union.

The school, where the eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, is also known as the birthplace of black theology. James H. Cone, a foremost scholar in that tradition, is still on the faculty.

In an interview from Seattle, on his way to visit Occupy protesters there, Dr. West said that his liberal politics were formed in Progressive Baptist churches, and that Union was “the institutional expression of my core identity as a prophetic Christian.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/nyregion/cornel-west-returning-to-union-theological-seminary.html

[mike_c]

1. sigh....

I really admire Cornel West as an academic and an intellectual. I might get to meet him tomorrow-- he's supposed to be at our strike at CSU East Bay-- but frankly, I'm really disappointed by his religiousity.