Pride
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"Pride goeth before destruction, a hoaughty spirit before a mighty fall." As the biblical fall of Satan suggests, pride as a defining symptom of self-preoccupation follows a paradoxical route at which end lies self-destruction. Dyson explores the fate of pride from Christian theology to the social responsibilities of self-regard and regard for the society as a whole. Pride is also vain glory, or the inordinate obsession with one's existence, body and intellect, which becomes the playground for human vanity. Dyson examines how pride, within black communities, becomes a necessary and ironic defense against a culture that at once formally rejected it in their vreligious beliefs but embraced it in their social realtions. As a result, blacks were ensconced, implicated, even embroiled, in the West's schizophrenic views of the deadly sin. Dyson will explore all these moments of pride, attempting to probe the contradictory facets of a vice that in some instances became a celebrated virtue, and a virtue among some cultures that ultimately became a vice.
Michael Eric Dyson is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. An ordained Baptist minister, he is the author of twelve books, including the New York Times bestselling Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? and Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves, and Demons of Marvin Gaye, as well as Holler If You
Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. He is a contributing editor at Christian Century.