Featured: DIVINE DISCONTENT by Jonathon Kahn [Vol. 2, #45]
Friday, November 20th, 2009
“Jeremiads, Sacrifice
and the Redemption of a People”
A Review of
Divine Discontent:
The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois.
By Jonathon Kahn.
Reviewed by Chris Smith.
Divine Discontent:
The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois.
Jonathon Kahn.
Hardback: Oxford UP, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]
I have long been familiar with the work of the twentieth century black cultural critic. W.E.B. DuBois, but it was not until I read two crucial books on race and theology last year (J. Kameron Carter’s RACE: A Theological Account and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s Free To Be Bound), that I began to see the prophetic value of DuBois’s work for the Church. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove describes the value he has found in DuBois’s writings:
Refusing both Uncle Tom’s subservience and Nat Turner’s radicalism, DuBois dreamed of a church that would serve an economic, social and political center for a strong black community. Here black women and men would create the world they longed to see while at the same time advocating for social change that would transform the racist systems around them…He dreamed of a church that would actually make a difference in a world where black folks get crushed and forgotten ( FREE TO BE BOUND 150).
Thus, I was excited to hear that Oxford University Press was releasing this Fall a new book on DuBois’s “Religious Imagination” – Divine Discontent by Jonathan Kahn. Before I venture too far into my review of this book, I should be clear that although it is not a very long book (the text of the book is only 135 pages), it is pretty intense — requiring a significant grounding in history, philosophy and theology — and is not the sort of book that the average reader would just pick up and enjoy. That being said, Divine Discontent is an essential work for understanding DuBois, his religious views and his use of religious language.
With three kids ages six and under, I am always on the lookout for excellent new picture books. I was therefore delighted to stumble upon the recent book Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane by Carole Boston Weatherford (and illustrated by Sean Qualls) at my local library. Although from the title, one would suspect that this book was about John Coltrane, which it is, it is not primarily a biography, but rather uses the story of Coltrane’s boyhood as a pretext to teach the spirit of jazz and the practice of listening. Or to put it differently, this is a biography of John Coltrane in sounds. Coltrane’s formation, as presented here, is fundamentally an aural one. Weatherford, using simple and poetic language, makes the case that the sounds that Coltrane heard as a school boy (“hambones knocking in Grandma’s pots,” “Mama playing hymns for the senior choir” or “the sobs of kinfolk at family funerals” for instance) were essential to the classic jazz pieces that he would come to compose. Listening, of course, as Weatherford’s telling Coltrane’s story here emphasizes is vital to the creation of art that is rooted in a people and a place. Qualls’s brightly colored illustrations, done in varying levels of abstraction over the course of the book, are reminiscent of the classic jazz-tinged work of Ezra Jack Keats and vividly capture the jazz imagination of Weatherford’s rendition of the Coltrane story. Weatherford’s writing ultimately climaxes at the heart of the story: “Before John was a Jazz Giant, he was all ears.” Ending on this resonant note challenges us to consider what we might create out of our own experiences among a people and a place if we too would only be “all ears”?
