I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society?

What is accurately portrayed is the rich humanity not just of Martin Luther King but of the movement, which was a multiracial movement. You had blacks and whites coming together and sacrificing, organizing and mobilizing the world. That's the first time we've had collective action put at the center of any kind of portrayal of Martin King on the screen.

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

Theology is indispensable for religious communities to make sense of themselves and their changing views about the world in light of what is perceived to be revelation, but, at the same time, that theology can have a pretentiousness, or double pretentiousness, if it is acontextual as opposed to contextual, if it is foundationalist as opposed to antifoundationalist, or ahistorical as opposed to historicist.

I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.