The Preacher Speaks

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a man of many faces. He’s an old-school ’70s lefty, a man who preached every Sunday in what the American religion scholar Martin Marty has called “greenish African-American pajamas.” He’s an intellectual, a professor who reads Hebrew and Greek, a gifted musician who can play a wide variety of instruments and a teacher who feels comfortable tossing around words like “hermeneutics,” as he did Monday morning in a speech at the National Press Club. And he’s an angry black man, a pastor who has spent his life fighting injustice everywhere he sees it. When a questioner asked him to explain the now-familiar sound bite