New Book on the Parables in Production!

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.