A “vagabond public intellectual,” West–in his best-selling collection of essays, Race Matters and other books (Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (written with bell hooks), Prophesy Deliverance!, An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, and The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism)—has given the Baptist tradition a progressive, contemporary life. Long a professor of religion and director of Afro-American studies at Princeton, he is presently a professor of the philosophy of religion and Afro-American studies at Harvard.
