As he looked into the crowd at the historic Riverside Church in Manhattan, the Reverend Raphael Warnock acknowledged that this eulogy was a difficult task, even for him.

A trained preacher and the senior pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta – Martin Luther King Jr.’s church – Warnock had likely presided over hundreds of funerals by that point in his career. But this funeral, on a Monday in early May 2018, was different. It was the funeral for his mentor, James Hal Cone, the founding father of “black liberation theology” who had personally requested that Warnock deliver his …