If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors.

In that chocolate side of town, in my blessed city of Sacramento, California - that was beginning of my death shudders, that's why Kierkegaard and Kafka began to make sense to me when I was very, very young - that radical sense fragility of life and inevitability of death; those trucks coming, if the truck came at a same time I was on the bridge, I was in the creek -my body would be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

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

It's true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that.

A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all.

There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.