Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s February 10 appearance at Rockefeller Chapel was more of a sermon in three acts than the workshop it was billed as. He opened with a meandering anecdote loosely centered on University of Chicago professor Dwight Hopkins, who along with Wright was part of a coterie that coaxed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro back into a Christian church in the late 1980s after a two-decade absence. Next, Wright contextualized the topic of his talk, “Who Is My Neighbor?” with an extended retelling of the Good Samaritan parable. In his “update,” a UofC student (privileged member of the ruling class) is nursed back to health by a gay ex-gang member (despised minority). Wright included some more landmarks and local color, much to the delight of the audience, a mix of Wright loyalists (one man in a Graduate School of Business T-shirt explained that he’d been baptized by Wright) and curiosity-seekers primed for provocative sound bites, even if they had to provoke them themselves.
Wright almost delivered on this desire in the last part of his speech, where he answered his titular question by pointing toward oppressed groups worldwide and upbraiding the American public for its ignorance regarding international affairs. But this was less than newsworthy, especially from a man who nearly brought down a Presidential campaign. In the Q&A session that followed, some were eager to draw that persona out, but Wright consistently resisted, even if he couldn’t help but engage in a back-and-forth with a man who asked why Wright had said that Hillary Clinton’s race was an impediment to her winning the Democratic nomination. “Did you hear the entirety of that sermon?” Wright asked him. “Yes I did,” he said. “Then,” Wright demanded, “Tell me the main points of the sermon!”
The firebrand of campaign YouTube videos and his April appearance at the National Press Club wasn’t there last Tuesday night; maybe he never existed. But the other Jeremiah Wright, the Doctor of Theology who wrote the book “Africans Who Shaped Our Faith” and attracted cerebral community leaders like Barack and Michelle Obama, didn’t show up either. His hour-long talk was often breezy and amusing but never especially edifying. The curiosity seekers were mostly let down—and the loyalists didn’t fare much better.
