The Council has spoken

The Watchers Council has met in secret conclave at one of their castle retreats (this one was at the Ortenberg Castle in the Black Forest near the headwaters of the Danube) and cast their votes for the weeks best posts.

The winning Council post is Black Liberation Theology by Joshuapundit. Here is a sample:

Since the dinosaur media was finally forced to acknowledge the issue of Jeremiah Wright and the UCC Trinity Church,the phrase `black liberation theology' has surfaced. Obama himself referred to this obliquely, talking about the sort of conversations he claims routinely occur in black churches -a stereotyped generalization if ever I've heard one.

But what exactly is meant by the phrase 'black liberation theology'? Where did it come from? And what does it reveal about who Barack Obama is?

Black liberation theology is an ethnocentric outgrowth - some would call it a tumor - of 'liberation theology', which was essentially a highly selective interpretation of the Gospels in an attempt to co-opt Christianity to promote communism and marxism. Liberation theology began with the Catholic Church in Latin America and elsewhere, and was used by radical priests and nuns who supported Fidel, Che Guevara, the Shining Path terrorists in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Later, it spread to some of the mainstream Protestant denominations in other areas.

Black liberation theology mixes this ideology with racist rhetoric derived from the black power movement back in the 1970's.

Jeremiah Wright himself was originally a member of the Nation of Islam, but later returned to Christianity as he latched onto the views of two race based theologists who became his mentors, Dwight Hopkins and James Cone.

Wright himself acknowledged this in a bizarre interview with Fox News on March 15th with Sean Hannity.

Both Hopkins and Cone are now tenured radicals in academia. Hopkins is a professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School; Cone works out of New York's Union Theological Seminary.

Back in the late 1960's and the early 1970's theologians like Hopkins and Cole essentially decided that blacks were the Chosen People. James Cone, the dean of the 'black liberation' theological school of thought, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black, rather than a Jew:

"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love. "

(from William R Jones, "Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology, in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology")

Or, to put it more simply, unless G-d hates whitey, black people have no use for him!

Go read the rest.

The winning non-Council post was 5 Years, 1 year by Acute Politics here is a sample:

We've been at war in Iraq for 5 long years now, with more long years to go (assuming, of course, that we don't pull out like naive teenagers). I wonder, though... who remembers (without looking!) when the war began in Afghanistan?

Jules Crittenden has your roundup of blogger opinion and editorial opinion on the anniversary.

It took5 years to research what a lot of those serving in Iraq already took prima facie, but Havard University social scientists believe there is a link between public criticism of the war and increases in violent insurgent attacks.

Go read the rest.

My thanks to the supreme head of the Watchers Council (who we regard as our own Jacques de Molay, Wesley Windom-Price and Tomás de Torquemada all rolled into one) for holding me worthy to join such an august assembly. My thanks to all my fellow council members who have extended their warm greetings and well wishes upon my ascension to the council. And my most heartfelt thanks to the blonde serving wench at the Ortenberg for making me very comfortable indeed.