SOURCE: A review of Keeping Faith, in Christian Century, September 21-28, 1994, pp. 864-5.

In the following review, Messer offers a positive assessment of Keeping Faith.

Disappointment and disillusionment with America are more prevalent now among African-Americans than at any time since the 1920s. Though the decline and decay of American life appear irreversible, Cornel West hangs on to the hope that “our prophetic thought and action” may yet open a way if we but keep faith with our deepest religions, moral and democratic commitments.

A self-defined public intellectual, West has been described as “inheriting the mantle of Reinhold Niebuhr” and as “a black John Dewey” who, as a serious philosophical thinker, addresses a wide range of social and political issues. Like a modern-day Martin Luther King Jr., he speaks and writes with prophetic power, is rooted in the black church experience and is equipped with extraordinary intellectual talents...