The Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community church, is my kind of preacher: a former gang member with a Harvard education who has devoted himself to keeping ghetto kids out of trouble. He also believes it's his Christian duty to verbally slap the black establishment upside the head when it's falling down on its job. In 1992, for example, he infuriated black intellectuals by accusing them of endlessly debating "Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Bourdieu, Lukacs, Habermas, and Marx" instead of trying to find solutions to inner-city crime and drug abuse. Three years later, he excoriated them...
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