Back to the topic though.

Rev Wright keeps invoking "black liberation theology" which is nothing more than 60s Black Power activists moving into conventional (read: socially conservative) African American churches to gain respectability, the same way many of them moved into conventional politics and the academy to gain MS and middle class acceptance and respectability.

When you look closely at the whole concept, you quickly discover it has absolutely no connection to the Latin American Catholic Church revolution, or the post Vatican II writings by Jesuit priest Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay, or Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru--the "fathers" of liberation theology.

I have all five of the Maryknoll's series of his writings, translated as "A Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity", and have read them all. I've also read Gutierrez's "A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation". (We have a Catholic relgious history scholar in the family who teaches at Xavier University in New Orleans.)

Those works still resonate deeply with me, though I'm not much of Catholic sojourner these days, needless to say. I have come to a place where I believe we all need to be artisans of a new humanity, but we desperately need to move well beyond the limits of conventional religion NOW. But those Catholic writings have had a lasting effect on my philosophy of life.

Thing is, the Rev Wright and his "godfather" of "black liberation theology", James Cone, don't seem to have read those writings. I find that hard to believe, but they don't ever invoke Segundo's work or the work of his spiritual community in the Peter Faber Center in Montevideo. Or Gutierrez. And both Wright and Cone should have hooked up with those guys, because they both have taught and lectured in the US, including at Harvard, Notre Dame, Catholic U & Union Theological Seminary.

So, I've always found their appropriation of the term "liberation theology" from the Latin American Catholic tradition of liberation, without ever referencing any of it's basic tenets, as pretty much of a political sham.

Now, I don't expect any one to agree with me or share my opinions about all of this, which are even more obscure in Christian theological terms than Bill Moyers & Riverside Church. But plenty of Catholic Latinos who do know who Segundo and Gutierrez are and what they represent to the Latin American church, look at these guys with more than a bit of suspicion. And I happen to agree with THEM, not the Rev Wright, Obama, and the so-called "black Christian religious tradition" et al.

Because those of us who know a little something about Christian traditions and US political history, know that Rev Wright's claims that he & Cone represent "THE" black Christian religious tradition (singular), aren't accurate, nor do they reflect the breadth and depth of the spiritual and religious traditions of black Americans, which hasn't been exclusively about the Middle Passage for nearly a century.