They didn’t teach her about James Cone at Cambridge.
Chine McDonald says she came late to the Black theologian but wishes she had been reading him at university. Lately, more Black American authors have stacked up on her book shelf: Esau McCaulley, Austin Channing Brown, Dante Stewart.
McDonald—the new director of the London-based evangelical think tank Theos—is one of the most prominent Black evangelical voices in Britain, but she has one eye gazing across the pond as she considers the dynamics of race and faith in her home country.
“I think one of the differences is that in the UK we have fooled ourselves to thinking we’re not like [America],” she told CT. “The past few years are showing us that actually we haven’t moved as forward as we would have liked to in terms of race and racial justice in our country.”
For one, “there’s almost this unwritten understanding in the UK that you can never be British if you’re not white,” she remarked.
Yet, Black…