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Any talk about God that fails to make God's liberation of the oppressed its starting point is not Christian.

— James H. Cone Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)

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More quotes by James H. Cone

Being black in America has little to do with skin color. Being black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.

Black Theology and Black Power (1969)

By becoming poor and entrusting divine revelation to a carpenter from Nazareth, God makes clear where one has to be in order to hear the divine word and experience divine presence.

Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)

If the church ... does not make God's liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message?

Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (1986)

A man is free when he sees clearly the fulfillment of his being and is thus capable of making the envisioned self a reality.

Black Theology and Black Power (1969)

Black Power seeks not understanding but conflict; addresses blacks and not whites; seeks to develop black support, but not white good will.

Black Theology and Black Power (1969)

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Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?

George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan (1923)

The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence, from Jerusalem, of a lunatic asylum.

Havelock Ellis

Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

Bertrand Russell Education and the Social Order (1932)

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law [this quote is referring to English Common Law].

Thomas Jefferson Vol. 1 Whether Christianity is Part of the Common Law (1764)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: James H. Cone (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.