| PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 1997 |
Teaching at the Crossroads of Faith and School:
Jeffrey Ayala Milligan
The Teacher as Prophetic Pragmatist
Murray State College/University of Oklahoma
What happens at the crossroads where secular education encounters religious faith? Is it a safe passage on different tracks separated by Jefferson's wall or is it sometimes an existential train wreck? I once jokingly asked a colleague in the small rural junior college where I teach how he, like myself the product of a graduate education in the humanities and a rural culture steeped in evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, could be a Southern Baptist deacon and at the same time one of the most literate and open-minded members of our faculty. His semi-serious reply was intriguing: "I often thank God that I became a Christian before I got an education." In this reply I believe my colleague made four implicit claims: 1) His faith is the core of his identity, 2) His education was vital to his personal and intellectual fulfillment, 3) His faith and education often conflicted to the point that one threatened the other, and 4) It was possible to reconcile the two.Though the most common image of this encounter between public education and religious faith is the conflict between fundamentalists and so-called "secular humanists," there is much more to this intellectual and spiritual crossroads.[1] Less strident voices, including many in this society, are carefully re-examining this relationship in an attempt to, in Dewey's words, find "a more inclusive plan of operations."[2] It is to that on-going conversation that I offer this modest contribution. In it I will explore the third and fourth of my colleague's implicit claims.
Specifically, I will critique one recent version of the claim that secular education is hostile to religion, suggesting that the implicit arguments upon which its resolution of that hostility is based do not offer an adequate conceptual framework for the inclusion of religion in public education.[3] I will then explore the implications of Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism for teaching and the teacher as a more promising conceptual validation of the proposition that religious faith and secular education may be reconciled without trivializing one or the other.
INCLUSION ON THE BASIS OF CULTURAL AND EPISTEMIC DIVERSITY Two arguments for the inclusion of religion in public education rest on the multicultural movement in U.S. education and the epistemological assumptions of post-analytic philosophy.[4] The first of these arguments takes as its starting point the recognition that religious faith continues to be a defining element of many individuals' identities and that religiously defined groups are cultural groups as surely as those championed by the multicultural movement. And some scholars, as well as ordinary members of faith communities, have put forth forcefully argued claims that these religious cultures are discriminated against and actively undermined by key social institutions, particularly secular education.[5] If the multicultural movement demands that education, like society in general, should give space and voice to minority points of view, then secular education should, they argue, include religious points of view.
The second of these arguments rests on the epistemological assumptions of certain forms of post-analytic philosophy. According to Cornel West, for instance, American neo-pragmatism recognizes that the inevitably theory-laden character of our engagement with the world around us renders futile any appeal to the "real" world as a final court of appeal for truth claims. Thus pragmatism eschews the search for epistemological foundations any place outside the socially and historically conditioned assumptions of particular communities at particular times and places.[6]
And feminist epistemologists have demonstrated how foundationalist epistemic claims have been used to conceal a subjective white, male, propertied knower engaged in the oppression of women and others. One response to that subjectivity, proposed by Lorraine Code, is to offer the way we know other people as an alternative epistemological paradigm that would displace what she calls "malestream" epistemology from its position as the way of knowing to a new position as a way of knowing, thus making room for other perspectives in an interdependent network which she describes as a kind of epistemic ecosystem.[7] Though such moves toward epistemic anti-foundationalism obviously undermine the knowledge and truth claims of many religious groups, they also challenge the truth claims and epistemic assumptions which have often been deployed to dismiss religious faith as an irrational, mythological relic of less enlightened times. If all truths are local products of historically, culturally, and politically conditioned discourses and objectivity is simply a fiction concealing the will to power of particular individuals or groups, then many of the traditional justifications for excluding religious questions from secular education are as discredited as religious faith itself.
If religious groups and sub-groups constitute distinct and in some cases marginalized cultures, and if, as post-analytic epistemological assumptions suggest, there are multiple, perhaps even equally valid ways of knowing rather than one correct way of knowing, then does not religion have some claim to space in public education as a marginalized culture, an alternative epistemology, as one of the voices of "the Other?" Warren Nord, in his recent book, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma, issues just such a challenge in a wide-ranging survey of the legal, historical, and ethical landscape of the relationship between religious faith and public education.[8]
A PLEA FOR FAIR TRADE IN THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS Warren Nord makes two basic claims. First, he asserts that public education is not neutral vis a vis the religious faiths students bring with them to school. Second, he argues public education has an ethical and legal obligation to be fair to religious worldviews. According to Nord, public education is governed by a modernist, secular worldview which undermines religious faith because its basic philosophical assumptions, conceptions of human nature, history, evidence, rational argumentation, etc. systematically reject, undermine, and contradict religious assumptions. To teach a subject - history or biology, for instance - from within this worldview as if it were Truth, when in fact it is contested, constitutes indoctrination in Nord's view. And in his view schools should avoid indoctrination. Public education should be neutral on religiously contested matters until students are mature enough to distinguish between teachers' opinions and truth-high school or undergraduate level, then education and educators no longer have the obligation to be scrupulously neutral but do have the ethical obligation to be fair.[9]
To be neutral, public education must take live religious options seriously as contenders for the truth. Nord suggests that we should teach as fact those areas where we agree, but where we disagree, where religious and secular ways of knowing offer competing conceptions of history, nature, and so forth, we should teach the conflicts; we should present both sides carefully and neutrally to enable students to understand the disagreement.[10] Nord's suggestion for achieving this kind of neutrality is rather simple: a required introductory religion course for all high school and undergraduate students, and where other introductory courses touch upon religiously contested knowledge they should locate themselves philosophically.
This can be accomplished, he says, by offering an introductory chapter which explicitly identifies the philosophical assumptions upon which the study of the topic is based, acknowledging that those assumptions are contested by other worldviews, and fairly representing those competing assumptions from within the parameters of that other worldview. From there the text or course can proceed with the topic at hand, where necessary acknowledging points of conflict with religion. The text or course need not offer an equally balanced treatment; it simply must acknowledge its location, that it is a version of the truth that is contested, and fairly represent the alternative from that alternative's perspective, not its own. In this way the course can be fair and avoid indoctrination.[11]
Underlying these arguments from cultural and epistemic pluralism to inclusion of religion in public education and Nord's plea for fairness is a guiding metaphor: the school as a marketplace of ideas.[12] Nord's argument is, in a sense, economic: religion has been unfairly excluded from competition in the marketplace; free and fair trade in ideas requires that it be allowed to compete. Students should be fairly and neutrally presented with the options; they should understand the choices. Religion is to be set upon the shelf alongside secular worldviews and the student/consumer will choose which product she wishes to "buy." But what are the implications of this metaphor? Will worldviews compete in the school's marketplace? Will children select a worldview? How? What would happen to minority worldviews in this market? Would such a system lead to a free and open exchange of ideas or the dominance of a few?[13]
Nord's critique of secular education's hostility to religion and his plea for the inclusion of live religious ways of knowing in public education rest to a significant extent on the arguments for cultural and epistemic diversity summarized above. These arguments and Nord's use of the marketplace metaphor suggest an endorsement of some version of ethical relativism. For if moral absolutism is unacceptable, as these arguments suggest, are the various worldviews in this marketplace morally equivalent? This seems to suggest an endorsement of strong relativism. But what then would a religiously inclusive system of education do with a religious worldview which sanctioned the systematic oppression of women or refused medical treatment for sick children? If worldviews are not morally equivalent, how does one make an ethical choice between worldviews when one's frame of reference is governed by one's own worldview? Is there an ethical vantage point outside one's worldview from which one can judge? This seems to suggest an endorsement of weak relativism.[14] What are the consequences of such a vantage point for the idea of inclusion? Does the logic of inclusion necessarily exclude or circumscribe the possibility of moral judgment?
Nord's response to the apparent dilemma which his plea for religious inclusion seems to raise is to endorse weak relativism; he suggests that there is a widely shared core of moral values which can guide ethical decisions in the school's marketplace of ideas.[15] And he is surely correct in this; murder, gratuitous violence, rape, theft and other acts probably are generally condemned as immoral. But how do these core values become ethical behavior or enable students to make moral distinctions? The problem is not the lack of a shared core of values but the lack of a consensus on what those values mean and how those meanings are put into practice in human experience. For surely ethics are given form and meaning in behavior, and those behaviors are culturally conditioned. So how does this abstract shared core of values avoid both strong relativism and moral absolutism in a context of cultural and epistemic diversity, a context which includes culturally and religiously sanctioned practices which may even be more repugnant than moral absolutism? It is not clear to me that Nord's endorsement of weak relativism is an adequate framework for the inclusion of religion in public education in a way which simultaneously eschews both moral absolutism and strong relativism and respects the cultural and epistemic diversity which constitutes the rationale of such inclusion.
In what follows, I will suggest that Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism may offer a more useful conceptual framework for it is rooted in a radically historicist perspective which rejects the objectivist/relativist dichotomy that Nord's approach assumes.[16] And if West's move toward prophetic pragmatism does indeed provide a framework for inclusion which affirms diversity while avoiding relativist and absolutist pitfalls, then something more is required of the teacher than Nord's neutral presenter of conflicting world views or the fair-minded ethical partisan. The teacher's praxis must affirm diversity even as it avoids these pitfalls. Could reconceiving the role of the teacher on the basis of prophetic pragmatism meet this challenge?
INCLUSION AND THE ETHIC OF PROPHETIC PRAGMATISM Cornel West locates prophetic pragmatism within the pragmatist tradition by embracing the historicist orientation and anti-foundationalism of pragmatism while identifying key failures of that tradition which West's project rectifies.[17] West argues that pragmatism fails to adequately appreciate the significance of political and economic forces; therefore, progressive Marxist social analysis is an indispensable analytic tool, balancing this weakness of pragmatism even as pragmatism compensates for Marxism's inadequate theorization of culture.[18] Furthermore, the pragmatist tradition - with the exception of W.E.B. DuBois, the Afro-American sociologist and philosopher of education - ignores race, displays a distrust of the masses as historical agents, and lacks an adequate understanding of the tragic, "the irreducible predicament of unique individuals who undergo dread, despair, disillusionment, disease and death and the institutional forms of oppression that dehumanize people. I believe," West writes, "that a deep sense of evil and the tragic must infuse any meaning and value of democracy."[19]
Thus prophetic pragmatism unites the radically historicist orientation and epistemic anti-foundationalism of pragmatism with the social analysis of progressive-particularly Gramscian-Marxism. It then incorporates a third key ingredient: the ethical norms of the prophetic wing of Afro-American protestant Christianity.[20]
The prophetic wing of the black protestant church makes two key contributions to West's prophetic pragmatism. It offers an articulation of moral and ethical norms firmly rooted in a cultural tradition which guides analysis and lends direction to pragmatic experimentalism. And, of equal importance, it offers a fully developed tragic sense which both preserves hope for a better future and requires struggle to realize that hope. These moral and ethical norms are founded on the belief that all human beings are created in the image of God and are, therefore, equal before God and alike in their claims to individual dignity and the respect of others[21] The tragic sense, which West argues both pragmatism and Marxism lack, stems from the Christian dialectic of human nature - the recognition of the dignity and fallenness of human beings who are called upon to struggle toward an ethical ideal which, because of their fallenness, can never be attained. This struggle is carried out both on an individual level and in communities which simultaneously support and critique the individual's struggle to realize these ideals. The individual is thus irreducible within participatory communities governed by the principle of mutual accountability.[22] This ethical perspective precludes the this-world utopias or distopias often promised or delivered by vulgar Marxisms while it candidly confronts the existential facts of human existence - "disease, disillusionment, despair, and death" - without giving up the struggle for a better world or giving up hope for an ethical ideal which, though recognized as unattainable within history, nevertheless guides human actions. This is, according to West, what the black protestant church, in particular, has offered African-Americans since its inception.
Therefore, West uses the term prophetic "in order to harken back to the rich, though flawed, traditions of Judaism and Christianity that promote courageous resistance against, and relentless critique of, injustice and social misery."[23] Attaching the term "pragmatism" creates a philosophical point of view which "analyzes the causes of unnecessary forms of social misery, promotes moral outrage against them, and organizes different constituencies to alleviate them, yet does so with an openness to its own blindnesses and shortcomings."[24]
West's Christian faith is central to his conceptualization of prophetic pragmatism. "I follow the biblical injunction to look at the world through the eyes of its victims," he writes, "and the Christocentric perspective which requires that one see the world through the lens of the Cross - and thereby see our relative victimizing and victimization."[25] However, West does not ignore the crimes of the Christian church or valorize Christianity over other religious traditions. He repeatedly recognizes and criticizes the racism, patriarchy, and homophobia of Christianity in general and the black church in particular.[26] He is also highly critical of the anti-Semitism and naive nationalism and parochialism of Louis Farrakhan and other black leaders.[27] And West explicitly affirms the relevance of prophetic orientations grounded in other religious or even secular traditions, though he claims secular traditions have not had the time or maturity "to bequeath to us potent cultural forms of ultimacy, intimacy, and sociality comparable to older and richer religious traditions." West's prophetic pragmatism is overtly Christian simply because it is the tradition in which he is grounded, which provides him meaning and sanity and because he has found none better for himself.[28]
How then does prophetic pragmatism chart a course between ethical objectivism and strong relativism in the school's culturally and epistemically diverse marketplace of ideas without resorting to a problematic weak relativism? I suggest the answer lies in the tension between the concepts prophetic and pragmatic. In the term "prophetic" West is calling upon a tradition of moral and ethical critique of existing societies from the perspective of ideals which, in a sense, transcend history since there is the recognition that they are unattainable by historically defined individual human beings. Nevertheless, the individual is obligated to struggle toward those ideals in the belief that progress is possible and the hope for the ultimate realization of them outside history. Thus, implicit in this sense of the prophetic is a humility - a pragmatism if you will - about the prospect of moral perfection within history buoyed by a faith in the possibility of moral progress and hope for moral victory outside history which simultaneously avoids moral pessimism and this-world utopianism. These ethical norms, which are only given meaning and substance within cultural communities, provide a moral direction which challenges and encourages the moral growth of their members. In the term "pragmatic" West is acknowledging the culturally and historically conditioned nature of these communities and their conceptions of knowledge, truth, and the good. According to West, the radical historicist perspective of pragmatism rejects the notion of some ethical "Archimedian point" outside one's worldview from which moral Judgments can be made. It emphasizes, rather, the "different dynamic human agreements and disagreements and changing community-specific criteria constituting continuous and discontinuous traditions which are linked in highly complex ways to multiple human needs, interests, biases, aims, goals, and objectives."[29] Thus prophetic pragmatism makes ethics its focal point from within the context of specific communities, bringing relentless critique to bear on actually existing human conditions (progressive Marxism being one of the important analytical tools in that critique) yet recognizing that the expression of these ideals and progress toward them will be conditioned by the cultural and historical circumstances in which they are expressed. In this way, according to West, prophetic pragmatism avoids moral objectivism and relativism - both strong and weak - by rejecting the philosophical grounds upon which both rest while preserving the possibility of ethical criticism and moral progress.[30]
THE TEACHER AS PROPHETIC PRAGMATIST What are the implications of West's thought for schooling and the teacher, particularly in the context of the inclusion of religion in public education? What would it mean for the teacher to be a prophetic pragmatist? Clearly, one consequence would be the placement of ethics rather than knowledge or, as is probably most common, utility at the center of educational practice. What would the content of this ethical focus be? Like West's prophet, the teacher might teach and practice the moral critique of human action, including not only social, political, and economic injustices but the ethical ramifications of subjects which are often considered "objective" - science, for instance - from the perspective of moral and ethical norms of different epistemic communities.
However, in recognizing the impossibility of attaining these ideals, the teacher would also recognize the inevitable imperfection of her own and her students' attempts to realize those ideals, maintaining an ethical humility while striving for those ideals which is all too often lacking in those who would make traditional values the focal point of education. This ethical focus would also uphold the dignity of the individual student as one made in the image of God and the irreducibility of that individual within participatory communities.
Clearly, though, the participatory communities to which many students belong are religious communities. The moral and ethical ideals which inform criticism of human actions and guide human progress will be justified and given shape and meaning within the culturally and historically conditioned discourse of that religious community. And if, as West suggests, pragmatism's anti-foundationalist epistemology and anti-realist ontology put all worldviews in similar historically and culturally conditioned boats, then the prophetic pragmatic teacher is in no position to reject a particular cultural expression of those moral and ethical norms - religious or otherwise - from any perspective outside of that worldview. However, the teacher might critically examine, and help her student critically examine, human actions from the perspective of the moral and ethical ideals within that particular worldview. Instead of fostering a critical intelligence informed by the fundamental assumptions of one world view, an approach that is necessarily hostile to the intelligence and moral value of other world views, the teacher might foster critical intelligences by developing skill and insight in moral reflection and growth within the student's own moral community. If, as West says, pragmatism places ethics rather than epistemology at the center of philosophical inquiry, then prophetic pragmatic teaching would make ethics the focus of educational practice. If the expression of moral and ethical ideals is necessarily historically and culturally conditioned, then surely public education in a diverse society would not be justified in promoting a single cultural expression of those ideals to the exclusion of others. And if the school includes diverse culturally conditioned conceptions of these ideals, then might the prophetic pragmatic teacher have some role in helping the student progress toward these ideals within that world view, to help him or her grow as a good Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, rather than grow out of them?
One might argue that this objective could best be accomplished in parochial schools, for what is the point in bringing children together into a public school if the aim of their education is to help them realize the moral and ethical ideals of the world view into which they were born? I suggest that the point lies in three values important to democratic culture which the interaction of worldviews can foster and the segregation of world views may not: humility, mutual understanding, and strength. The bringing together of various religious and non-religious worldviews in the public school creates a climate where students engaged in moral growth within the culturally and historically defined parameters of their own worldview interact with and learn from other students engaged in their own ethical journeys. Such interaction might then foster a level of understanding and exchange between worldviews which would in turn foster a degree of humility from the recognition that one's own community may not have all the ethical answers and strength from the challenges to one's own moral understanding such interaction would inevitably bring. The teacher as prophetic pragmatist would fortify the student in her moral journey while always keeping in mind that, at the particular crossroads the teacher occupies, there are many roads to the good and perhaps many goods. Thus the school becomes a model of the participatory community which simultaneously affirms and critiques moral growth within and among the diverse communities represented in it. This would differ from the state of affairs Nord's market metaphor implies in that it does not suggest competition between winners and losers or "buying" into worldviews. It suggests rather mutual support and sustenance in students' various moral journeys.
There are clearly some dangers in such a conception of the teacher, dangers which stem from the rather delicate balance between the prophetic and the pragmatic in West's conception of prophetic pragmatism, a balance which sometimes seems rather precarious even in West's own writing. For instance, in a rural culture like my own which is so thoroughly permeated by the assumptions of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity, would this conception of the teacher merely serve as a practical sanction for the overt expression of an already dominant and not always ethically motivated worldview? Would the prophetic drag the pragmatic over into some version of moral absolutism? In other areas where the diversity of worldviews threatens conflict, would the pragmatic gag the prophetic with a normative relativism that refuses to critique ethical claims? Or would the inclusion of religious worldviews in the public school within the conceptual framework of prophetic pragmatism bring balance and critical scrutiny to the unchallenged fundamentalist and evangelical assumptions of some rural schools and make space for dialogue within the school rather than trying to bar the gates to the conflicts going on outside it?
So much of contemporary public discourse on education focuses on its role in economic progress and meeting the needs of business and industry. Even many of those who are most vocal in calling for the inculcation of values by public schools support this utilitarian focus, conflating economic and moral values under the heading of "traditional American values." But if public education is going to take religion seriously, as many argue it should, then ethics - the struggle to understand what is good and not good, what is right and not right, what one ought and ought not to do - not economic utility has to be the focus of educational practice. And if public education is going to include religion as a legitimate expression of the search for the truth, then market metaphors are unacceptable conceptual frameworks for negotiating between differing worldviews in a democratic system of education. If the cultural and epistemic arguments for the inclusion of religion in public education have any validity, then reconceiving the role of the teacher as prophetic pragmatist may offer a worthwhile framework for affirming religious diversity in our schools.
***For a response to this essay, see Garrison.
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Susan Laird and Tom Boyd at the University of Oklahoma for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.[1] See Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, The Glory and the Power: The Fundamentalist Challenge to the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 37-87 and Barbara B. Gaddy, T. William Hall, and Robert J. Marzano, School Wars: Resolving Our Conflicts Over Religion and Values (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996).
[2] See, for instance, Nel Noddings, Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993); Paul Farber, "Tongue Tied: On Taking Religion Seriously in School" Educational Theory 45, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 85-100; Barry Kanpol, "Critical Pedagogy and Liberation Theology: Borders for a Transformative Agenda" Educational Theory 46, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 105-18; Richard Pratte, "Civic Conscience and Religious Conscience: A Fundamental But Not Fundamentalist Distinction," Philosophy of Education 1987 (Normal, Ill: Philosophy of Education Society, 1988) and others. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 5.
[3] Time and space considerations will not allow a thorough conceptual definition of the concept of faith in this essay. As I do not believe such a definition is crucial to the argument presented here, my use of the term religious faith simply denotes the commonsense understanding of this concept. For a more thorough discussion of faith as a concept see Jeffrey Ayala Milligan, "Religion, Public Education, and Dewey's Call for an 'Intelligent' Theory of Education" Educational Foundations 10, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 69-84 or Dewey J. Hoitenga, Faith and Reason from Plato to Plantinga: An Introduction to Reformed Epistemology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). By inclusion I mean taking religious faith seriously in public education as one way in which people have made and make sense of their existential condition.
[4] I treat both of these arguments at greater length elsewhere. See Jeffrey Ayala Milligan, "Multiculturalism and the Religious Right: Is Dialogue Possible" Journal of Thought 31, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 45-54 and Milligan, "Religion, Public Education and Dewey's Call."
[5] See Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Doubleday, 1993) and Warren A. Nord, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
[6] Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 3-8 and "The Politics of American Neo-pragmatism," in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 259-75.
[7] Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1991), 269-84.
[8] Nord, Religion and American Education, 236-41.
[9] Ibid., 63-97, 161-91, 236-41, 378.
[10] Ibid., 187-89, 342, 379.
[11] Ibid., 258-59.
[12] Ibid., 246.
[13] For instance, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), point out that membership in the more conservative evangelical and fundamentalist denominations has increased while membership in mainline denominations has declined. They too use an economic model to explain this phenomenon. They suggest that the greater emotional, spiritual, and economic "investments" required by the conservative denominations promise greater "returns" and thus attract more "investors" than the mainline denominations which, paradoxically, lose adherents because they require and promise less. If this is so, allowing religion into the school's marketplace of ideas may create a tendency toward dominance rather than free exchange.
[14] The distinctions made here between strong and weak relativism are taken from Cornel West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), 4-13.
[15] Nord, Religion and American Education, 340-43.
[16] West, Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, 12.
[17] Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107-18, 135-41.
[18] Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 95-130; West, Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, xxi-xxiv; Cornel West, Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1993), 177-82; and Keeping Faith, 133.
[19] West, American Evasion, 128, 137, 228 and West, Keeping Faith, 114.
[20] Ibid., 211-214, 226-235; West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 16.
[21] West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 16, 18.
[22] Ibid., 17-19.
[23] West, Keeping Faith, 139.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., 133.
[26]West, American Evasion, 233.
[27] Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1988), 77, 140, 171-73.
[28] West, Keeping Faith, 132-34.
[29] West, Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought, 13.
[30] Ibid., 12.