The Preacher King
The Preacher King

Author: Richard Lischer

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190065117

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The Preacher King investigates Martin Luther King Jr.'s religious development from a precocious "preacher's kid" in segregated Atlanta to the most influential America preacher and orator of the twentieth century. To give the most accurate and intimate portrait possible, Richard Lischer draws almost exclusively on King's unpublished sermons and speeches, as well as tape recordings, personal interviews, and even police surveillance reports. By returning to the raw sources, Lischer recaptures King's truest preaching voice and, consequently, something of the real King himself. He shows how as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of preachers, King early on absorbed the poetic cadences, traditions, and power of the pulpit, more profoundly influenced by his fellow African-American preachers than by Gandhi and the classical philosophers. Lischer also reveals a later phase of King's development that few of his biographers or critics have addressed: the prophetic rage with which he condemned American religious and political hypocrisy. During the last three years of his life, Lischer shows, King accused his country of genocide, warned of long hot summers in the ghettos, and called for a radical redistribution of wealth. 25 years after its initial publication, The Preacher King remains a critical study that captures the crucial aspect of Martin Luther King Jr.'s identity. Human, complex, and passionate, King was the consummate American preacher who never quit trying to reshape the moral and political character of the nation.

Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present
Preaching with Sacred Fire: An Anthology of African American Sermons, 1750 to the Present

Author: Martha Simmons

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2010-08-16

Total Pages: 989

ISBN-13: 039305831X

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One hundred sermons that display the victorious, although sometimes painful, historical and spiritual pilgrimage of black people in America. A groundbreaking anthology, Preaching with Sacred Fire is a unique and powerful work. It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology—which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others—offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history. The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the rise and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the future of African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods. The preachers of these sermons are men and women from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, using metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. “Even during the most difficult and oppressive times,” Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, “the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege.” This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.

Undaunted by the Fight
Undaunted by the Fight

Author: Harry G. Lefever

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780865549760

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Undaunted by the Fight is a study of small but dedicated, group of Spelman College students and faculty who, between 1957 and 1967 risked their lives, compromised their grades, and jeopardized their careers to make Atlanta and the South a more just and open society. Lefever argues that the participation of Spelman's students and faculty in the Civil Rights Movement represented both a continuity and a break with the institution's earlier history. On the one hand their actions were consistent with Spelman's long history of liberal arts and community service; yet, on the other hand; as his research documents; their actions represented a break with Spelman's traditional non-political stance and challenged the assumption that social changes should occur only gradually and within established legal institutions. For the first time in the eighty-plus years of Spelman's existence, the students and faculty who participated in the Movement took actions that directly challenged the injustices of the social and political status quo. Too often in the past the Movement literature, including the literature on the Atlanta Movement focused disproportionately on the males involved to the exclusion of the women who were equally involved, and; who, in many instances, initiated actions and provided leadership for the Movement. Lefever concludes his study by saying that Spelman's activist students and faculty succeeded to the extent they did because they kept their eyes on the prize. They endured the struggle; he says; and, in so doing; eventually won many prizes -- some personal, others social. Undaunted; they liberated themselves, but at the same time they liberated their school, their city and the larger society.

Parting the Waters
Parting the Waters

Author: Taylor Branch

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-04-16

Total Pages: 1731

ISBN-13: 1416558683

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In Parting the Waters, the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a “compelling…masterfully told” (The Wall Street Journal) account of Martin Luther King’s early years and rise to greatness. Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War. Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder. Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.

African American Religious Thought
African American Religious Thought

Author: Cornel West

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 2003-01-01

Total Pages: 1084

ISBN-13: 9780664224592

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Believing that African American religious studies has reached a crossroads, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude seek, in this landmark anthology, to steer the discipline into the future. Arguing that the complexity of beliefs, choices, and actions of African Americans need not be reduced to expressions of black religion, West and Glaude call for more careful reflection on the complex relationships of African American religious studies to conceptions of class, gender, sexual orientation, race, empire, and other values that continue to challenge our democratic ideals.

Encyclopedia of African American Religions
Encyclopedia of African American Religions

Author: Larry G. Murphy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-20

Total Pages: 1738

ISBN-13: 1135513457

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Preceded by three introductory essays and a chronology of major events in black religious history from 1618 to 1991, this A-Z encyclopedia includes three types of entries: * Biographical sketches of 773 African American religious leaders * 341 entries on African American denominations and religious organizations (including white churches with significant black memberships and educational institutions) * Topical articles on important aspects of African American religious life (e.g., African American Christians during the Colonial Era, Music in the African American Church)

Unless a Grain of Wheat
Unless a Grain of Wheat

Author: Thomas A. Oduro

Publisher: Langham Global Library

Published: 2021-10-06

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1839735732

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For six decades, North American Mennonites have walked alongside African Independent Churches (AICs) as they have navigated their faith journey between the ancient traditions of the ancestors and the newer claims of Christ upon their lives. The story of these relationships is a fascinating pilgrimage in partnership, offering hope for a mutuality that slips the knots of colonialism and testifies to the unifying power of the Holy Spirit. Beginning with a historical overview by missiologist Wilbert R. Shenk, this volume contains the reflections of over fifty AIC and Mennonite colleagues concerning the significance and impact of this long-standing partnership. Their stories illustrate the disparate threads of a sixty-year experiment in shared endeavor, while offering insight into the history of the church and missions in Africa. This book is a powerful account of mutual learning, forgiveness, and growth. It is an excellent resource for lovers of story, students of post-colonialism and indigenous Christianity, and all those concerned with building relationships across cultural and racial divides.

God and Human Dignity
God and Human Dignity

Author: Rufus Burrow Jr.

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 1992-01-31

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0268161011

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Although countless books have been devoted to the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., few, if any, have focused on King's appropriation of, and contribution to, the intellectual tradition of personalism. Emerging as a philosophical movement in the early 1900s, personalism is a type of philosophical idealism that has a number of affinities with Christianity, such as a focus on a personal God and the sanctity of persons. Burrow points to similarities and dissimilarities between personalism and the social gospel movement with its call to churchgoers to involve themselves in the welfare of both individuals and society. He argues that King's adoption of personalism represented the fusion of his black Christian faith and his commitment not only to the social gospel of Rauschenbusch, but most especially to the social gospelism practiced by his grandfather, father, and black preacher-scholars at Morehouse College. Burrow devotes much-needed attention both to King's conviction that the universe is value-infused and to the implications of this ideology for King's views on human dignity and his concept of the "Beloved Community." Burrow also sheds light on King’s doctrine of God. He contends that King's view of God has been uncritically and erroneously relegated by black liberation theologians to the general category of "theistic absolutism" and he offers corrections to what he believes are misinterpretations of this and other aspects of King’s thought. He concludes with an application of King’s personalism to present-day social problems, particularly as they pertain to violence in the black community. This book is a useful and fresh contribution to our understanding of the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. It will be read with interest by ethicists, theologians, philosophers, and social historians.