The burgeoning terrain of Martin Luther King Jr. studies is leading to a new appreciation of his thought and its meaningfulness for the emergence and shaping of the twenty-first-century world. This volume brings together an impressive array of scholars from various backgrounds and disciplines to explore the global significance of King—then, now, and in the future.Employing King’s metaphor of “the great world house,” the major focus is on King’s appraisal of the global-human struggl...

"An exuberant, thought-provoking assessment of the dilemmas facing black churches" examining their historic role in today's cultural landscape ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).In The Ground Has Shifted, Walter Earl Fluker discusses the historical and current role of the Black church and argues that the older race-based language and metaphors of religious discourse have outlived their utility. He offers instead a larger, global vision for the Bl...

A new collection of philosophical biographies of key figures in Black Southern American social and political thoughtFrederick Douglass, Booker Washington and Ida Wells. Thurgood Marshall and Martin King are focused upon, together with Howard Thurman, Richard Wright, Fred Gray and Barbara Jordan. All are important in various ways to the movements this book seeks out. From the perspective of liberation, the two high points in the African-American Odyssey are marked by Emancipation in...

In the 1970s, James Earl Massey wrote a book about his beloved mentor, the noted theologian and preacher Howard Thurman. The completed manuscript was never published. Howard Thurman: Reflections on a Luminous Life finally brings this book to the public.This book presents the latest, 1977 version of James Earl Massey's manuscript, lightly edited for clarity. Edited by Dr. Curtiss Paul DeYoung, it includes editorial commentary, a history of the relationship between James Ear...

The contributors to this book address the theme of educating ethical leaders for the twenty-first century. They represent a wide range of fields, including philosophy, theology, law, science, and medicine. They all share the belief, however, that ethical leadership education is necessary in order to provide the next generation of leaders with the tools that they will need to successfully navigate the challenges of today and of the coming decades. These essays identify significant issues an...

How have millions of American Christians come to measure spiritual progress in terms of their financial status and physical well-being? How has the movement variously called Word of Faith, Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, or simply prosperity gospel come to dominate much of our contemporary religious landscape? Kate Bowler's Blessed is the first book to fully explore the origins, unifying themes, and major figures of a burgeoning movement that now claims millions of followers in Am...

The president of New York University offers a love letter to America’s most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality.For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other.Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding....

Think you know how the game of baseball began? Think again.Forget Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. Forget Alexander Joy Cartwright and the New York Knickerbockers. Instead, meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and Louis Fenn Wadsworth, each of whom has a stronger claim to baseball paternity than Doubleday or Cartwright.But did baseball even have a father—or did it just evolve from other bat-and-ball games? John Thorn, baseball’s preeminent historian, examines th...

Hank Hanegraaff documents the danger of looking for God in all the wrong places and goes behind the scenes into the wildly popular and bizarre world of contemporary revivalism. Hanegraaff masterfully exposes the stark contrast between these deeds of the flesh and a genuine work of the Spirit by contrasting modern "revivals" with the scriptural examples of God's movement among His people.

"One of the great religious leaders of [the twentieth] century" tells his story of growing up under segregation and finding his calling as a minister ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution).Howard Thurman was a singular man—a minister, philosopher, and educator whose vitality and vision touched the lives of countless people of all races, faiths, and cultures.In his moving autobiography, Dr. Thurman tells of his lonely years growing up in a segregated town, w...

Joy Unspeakable focuses on the aspects of the black church that point beyond particular congregational gatherings toward a mystical and communal spirituality not within the exclusive domain of any denomination. This mystical aspect of the black church is deeply implicated in the well-being of African American people but is not the focus of their intentional reflection. Moreover, its traditions are deeply ensconced within the historical memory of the wider society and can be found ...

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet...