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| Dr. Howard Thurman |
I have
mentioned this possibility a couple of times over the past year or so, but I am
delighted to announce that a new book that I co-edited with my friend Kipton
Jensen, a professor at Morehouse College, is now in production by Orbis Books.
The book
is another (like The Parables after Jesus) reception history project on the
parables, but this one focuses specifically on Howard Thurman and the parables
of Jesus: Sermons on the Parables by
Howard Thurman.
Dr.
Thurman is perhaps best known as a mentor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but
Thurman’s importance goes well beyond his influence on King and others in the
civil rights movement. Thurman played a vital role in laying the spiritual
foundation for the early civil rights movement in the United States (including
being one of the first ones to meet with Mahatma Gandhi and to include Gandhi's
insights into his theology/philosophy).
The book
contains fifteen sermons of Thurman on the parables of Jesus. Fourteen of them
have never been published before. We transcribed these sermons from audios
housed in Pitts Theology Library of Emory University.
Kipton
and I also wrote an Introduction and Conclusion to the volume, as well as
introductions to all fifteen sermons. The book also will provide links to
online audios of the sermons so that readers of the book can also listen to
Thurman's powerful sermons for themselves.
It was an
exciting and meaningful project, truly a labor of love. As one sign of our
gratitude to Howard Thurman and his family, Kipton and I are donating all
royalties generated by the book to the Howard Thurman Educational Trust at
Morehouse College.
It also
was an honor to work with Orbis Books, a publisher that I have admired for all
of my career. Kipton and I are delighted that Robert Ellsberg of Orbis saw the
importance of Thurman's contributions and decided to support and publish this
project.
In other
news, I also have two other projects on the parables forthcoming (one book
chapter and another book) that I will announce in the near future.
