The Quotable Black Scholar: Cornel West on Vocation and Truth
Princeton University Professor Cornell West
(Source: nj.com)
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Just like the musicians, I’ve got a unique voice. I’m constantly searching for truth. I don’t restrict myself to traditional boundaries. There’s a difference between a vocation and a profession. One’s a calling, the other’s a career. I have a calling. When you have your calling you have to be true to yourself and true to the God that called you. My calling is to try and tell the truth.
— Dr. Cornel West, in an interview in publish in Inside Jersery
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Biographical Notes: Cornel West is the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion, at Princeton University. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University (he completed his degree in only three years), West went on to complete his Ph.D. at Princeton.
West is the author of a number of books and articles, including the following:
- Black Theology and Marxist Thought (1979)
- Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982)
- Prophetic Fragments (1988)
- The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989)
- Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with bell hooks, 1991)
- The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991)
- Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (1993)
- Race Matters (1993)
- Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1994)
- Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (with rabbi Michael Lerner, 1995)
- The Future of the Race (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 1996)
- Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America (Edited by Kelvin Shawn Sealey, 1997)
- The Future of American Progressivism (with Roberto Unger, 1998)
- Cornel West: A Critical Reader (George Yancy, editor) (2001)
- Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (2004)
- Post-Analytic Philosophy, edited with John Rajchman.
- Hope On a Tightrope: Words & Wisdom (2008).
- Brother West: Living & Loving Out Loud (2009).
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