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SANTA FE — When Ron Wilson, a tutor at St. John’s College, asked Cornel West to speak for the university’s spring Steiner Lecture, West told him he would hitchhike, if necessary, “to speak to the kids about the great books.”

“That was that,” said Wilson, who met West as a graduate at Princeton University, where he first became acquainted with the well-known philosopher and social critic’s unorthodox approach to inquiry-based learning and evangelical lecture style.

As it turned out, West made it to New Mexico by plane for his talk on Friday at the private university in the foothills above Santa Fe, where he expressed admiration for the school’s Socratic teaching of the classics and stressed the importance of finding one’s voice in times of “catastrophe.”

“The best that we human beings have been able to do, not just now but in the past,” West said, “is to create moments of interruption that hold back the organized greed and weaponized hatred and institutionalized indifference and cruelty.”

In a lecture that seamlessly weaved religion, philosophy and history, West returned more than once to a central historical figure: Mamie Till, who became an icon of the early Civil Rights Movement after her 14-year-old son, Emmett, was murdered in Drew, Mississippi, in 1955.

“Given my short time in time and space,” he said, “how do I account for Emmett Till’s mother — her only child, her only baby, who was murdered by cowardly white supremacists, sick brothers, who dropped that body in the Tallahatchie River, 14-years old from the south side of the Chicago?”

West said Mamie Till, who famously held an open-casket funeral for her son to display the beating he had endured at the hands of his killers, exemplified a modern-day Job, who in the Old Testament maintains his faith and integrity despite extreme suffering.

“When your armor is in place — when you have the joy, the courage — you can't help but want to help somebody,” West said, eliciting laughter from the audience when he added, “Now I’m talking about the poetry in Job. I’m not talking about the prologue and the epilogue — that prose is something else.”

West was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his grandfather was a pastor at Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church. When he was still young, West moved with his parents to Sacramento, California, where he participated in civil rights demonstrations and protests as a teenager.

He enrolled at Harvard College, where he graduated magna cum laude after studying Middle Eastern languages and literature. West also studied philosophy at Harvard under Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell, whose work he credited during Friday night’s lecture.

“Nihilism is always a challenge,” West said. “The great Stanley Cavell used to talk about this all the time. In terms of skepticism, there’s always truth in skepticism, but no one can live wholesale skepticism.”

After Harvard, West went on to graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received a master’s degree and became the first African American in the university’s history to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy, according to Princeton’s Department of African American Studies.

Throughout his career, West has held professorships and fellowships at Harvard, Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, the University of Paris and Princeton. In June 2023, he made a bid for nominee in the People’s Party in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

He’s also made several spoken word and hip-hop albums and appeared in “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” as the eponymously named character, “Councilor West,” according to .

“He has a mystique around him,” said Roman Morous, one of dozens of St. John’s students who came to hear West speak on Friday night. “There's something larger than life about him, and I've always been interested in what he had to say. He's very eclectic in his reach, and he speaks about a lot. He came here to St John's when my dad was a senior, and he spoke at his commencement.”

That was in 2001, according to Sarah Davis, dean at St. John’s College, who said West’s “interest in a classical liberal education really aligned with the project of the college.”

“He's such a beautiful speaker and passionate and sort of larger than life,” she added.

West’s talk blended references from Plato to Faulkner to Dostoyevsky Friday night in a talk that delivered a message of hope and humor, eliciting laughter, applause and murmurs of thoughtful consideration from students, alumni and faculty alike.

“Every single remark he made, whether you agreed with it or disagreed with it, was so clearly an example of a dazzling intellect — dazzling because it is so clearly labored at, worked upon, engaged with,” Wilson said. “I think that's probably what every person, again, whether you disagreed or agreed with him, had to admire and had wanted to imitate.”

West largely steered clear of politics Friday night, but the undertones of the current moment were the clear framing for a discussion aimed at inspiring young people who are “wrestling with spiritual, social, economic and political catastrophe.”

“Don't ever believe that you're not making a difference,” West said toward the end of his lecture. “You're creating moments of interruption, critical thought, witness of love and justice, organizing and mobilizing — if we're strong enough to bring power and pressure to bear on the prevailing, unjust status quo.”

John Miller is the sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ���’s northern New Mexico correspondent. He can be reached at jmiller@abqjournal.com.