A 'vagabond public intellectual', his best-selling collection of essays, Race Matters and other books, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (co-authored with bell hooks), and Prophesy Deliverance! The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, have given the Baptist tradition a progressive, contemporary life. Long a professor at Princeton's Department of Religion and Director of the Department of Afro--American studies, he is presently a professor of the philosophy of religion and professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard.