Building Beloved Communities traces the life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith (b. 1935), an iconoclastic black minister who has channeled his civil rights work into establishing multi-racial churches in four cities—Buffalo, NY; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; Brooklyn, NY—over a six-decade career. Following the lead of his mentor, Dr. Howard Thurman (who was also a key influence on Martin Luther King Jr.), Smith has concentrated on building thriving multicultural congregations to create the sorts of communities envisioned by King and others. In 1979, he became the first black minister of all-white Hillside Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, making him a unique leader among the 4,000 Presbyterian congregations in the United States. In 1986, he was elected the first African American pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Throughout his ministry in various churches, he has consciously moved his congregations toward being explicitly multi-cultural and multi-racial, as well as more politically active and welcoming of LGBTQ communities. Hendrickson examines his pastoral care and his increased work with corporations, colleges, and charitable foundations. Building Beloved Communities details the complicated life of a man dedicated to serving as a bridge between Christianity, community activism, public health institutions, and the business world. Based on archival research, historical analysis, and original interviews with Smith and his colleagues, Hildi Hendrickson offers a critical biography of the preacher and his work from the 1960s to the present.
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-08-01 - Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Building Beloved Communities traces the life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith (b. 1935), an iconoclastic black minister who has channeled his civil rights work into establishing multi-racial churches in four cities—Buffalo, NY; Atlanta, GA; St. Louis, MO; Brooklyn, NY—over a six-decade career. Following the lead of his mentor, Dr. Howard
Authors: Jacob L. Goodson, Brad Elliott Stone, Philip Rudolph Kuehnert
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-10-27 - Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Is the beloved community local, national, global, or universal? What kind of love is required for the beloved community? Is such a community only an ideal, or can it be actualized in the here and now? Tracing the phrase beloved community from Josiah Royce through Martin Luther King Jr. to
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008-07-31 - Publisher: Hachette UK
A noted theologian explains how the radical idea of Christian love animated the African American civil rights movement and how it can power today's social justice struggles Speaking to his supporters at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that their common goal
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-04-29 - Publisher: Springer
Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism offers compelling and intersectional religious critiques of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the normative rationality of contemporary global capitalism that orders people to live by the generalized principle of competition in all social spheres of life. Keri Day asserts that neoliberalism and its moral orientations consequently breed radical