In his conclusion, Dr. Cone writes that the 'lynching tree frees the cross from the pieties of well-meaning Christians.' Reading The Cross & The Lynching Tree requires an inversion of logic, one that requires seeing Christ's teaching that 'he who will save his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for (His) sake will find it.' The Cross, like the lynching tree, was an instrument of terror designed to cow an oppressed people into submission and living with its reality liberates people from being silenced by the fear of it. Cone's teaching is a tremendous work of both scholarship and heartfelt preaching. ( )

Excellent and heartbreaking and quite the reckoning. The Christian God is a god of the oppressed. Those without power take solace in the cross and what came after. America was never a Christian nation, not with a history of violence like this. When will we stop being the oppressors. ( )

An amazing book in structure and analysis. His sections on artistry, MLK, and Reinhold Niebuhr are amazing. The parts on feminism and the blues aren't as strong, but should still be read. Overall, as people get into an uproar on Critical Race Theory, or any thinking that looks at the context and history of how racism has influenced America, this book is a must-read. His overall contrasting of how white Christians can look to Jesus, while still using lynching historically needs to be reckoned with. ( )

Non-Fiction that focuses on the parallels between Jesus's Crucifixion and the terror of the Lynching Era in America. SO GOOD. Has opened my eyes to so much. I think all white American Christians should have to read this book. Will probably write a detailed blog post about this book because I have SO MANY THOUGHTS both about how education has failed to teach me--a good student--American history but also just on the lack of communal repentance in white churches. Like seriously, my education never covered the civil rights era (in public schools! IN THE DEEP SOUTH) and my limited understanding of lynching literally came from Quantum Leap. 10/10 highly recommend. ( )

The author's meditations on considering lynching and the lynching tree as a means by which to view the crucifixion of Jesus in the Black American experience.

The author described the horror of lynching: the actual event, the pretense about justice but the real purpose involving constant terrorization of the Black community, the tolerated violence, and the acquiescence of society in general to such things for generations. He draws the parallels between lynching as extrajudicial humiliation and degradation designed to terrorize the oppressed and reinforce the power of the oppressor and the experiences Jesus suffered on the cross.

The author analyzes Reinhold Niebuhr, so beloved as a theologian, and yet how he distanced himself on the issue of lynching and racial justice with a milquetoast disapproval without doing any concrete action to resist the status quo. He shows how Niebuhr was not significantly influenced by the Black Christian tradition in America the way that, say, Bonhoeffer was; the whole section reads as a great lament.

It is hard to put the experience of this book into words. Every white American Christian should read it and grapple with it, wrestling with how so many professed Jesus and yet participated in lynchings, and how so many want to hallow America's past as times in which America was a "Christian nation" and people tried to "honor God"...and yet lynchings were pervasive in the latter part of the 19th and the first two thirds of the 20th centuries, and they were either participated in or tacitly not condemned. It proves very difficult to countenance the proposition such could be considered a "Christian nation," and anyone who would try to maintain such a pretense and consider this some "unfortunate exception" tells on themselves.

For generations white Americans had the opportunity to serve Black people as if they were Jesus (cf. Matthew 25:31-46). Instead, they often lynched Him. The horror is real. The horror is awful. What kind of people do we prove to be if we can't handle it and try to look away and pretend otherwise? ( )