Reinhold Niebuhr was among the most influential American theologians in the twentieth century. The author of Moral Man and Immoral Society, he emphasized the need to guard against the evil inherent in humanity, and his ideas ultimately helped inform the Civil Rights movement. Read More

Danielle L. McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street documents the widespread rape of black women by white men in the south, and argues that responding to these crimes served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights movement. While such rapes were common, they were rarely prosecuted, and seeking justice become a key demand of civil rights workers. Read More

On Tuesday, March 27th, Charles Marsh will co-present a feature entitled “Does God Care About Justice?” with PLT Contributor John M. Perkins at the Veritas Forum at Pepperdine University. Read More

Michael K. Honey’s “Going Down Jericho Road” is a detailed and readable history that examines both the local history of black workers’ struggle for union rights and King’s Poor People’s Campaign. A work that is equally a labor history and a history of civil rights, Honey’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the last phase of King’s career. Read More

On September 24, 2014, Paul M. Gaston, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia, captivated a large audience with his guest lecture on his experience as a local activist in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Focusing his lecture around the theme “how you bring about change,” Gaston used the University of Virginia as his primary example and also included personal anecdotes on the process of integration in the Charlottesville community. Read More

In Paradise Lust, Brook Wilensky-Lanford introduces readers to the enduring modern quest to locate the Garden of Eden on Earth. It is an obsession that has consumed scientists and theologians alike, including the first president of Boston University and a knighted British engineer. Today the search has been taken up by amateurs. Inspired by an Eden seeker in her own family, Wilensky-Lanford writes of these unusual men and women with sympathy and wit. Read More

In The Face of Water, Sarah Ruden brilliantly and elegantly explains and celebrates the Bible’s writings. Singling out the most famous passages, such as the Genesis creation story, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes, Ruden reexamines and retranslates from the Hebrew and Greek what has been obscured and misunderstood over time. Read More

On February 8, Christopher Yates led a seminar discussion on Simone Weil. Using passages from Weil’s writing, Yates contemplates impressions about her life and ideas using the following seven guiding principles found in her work: devotion to intellectual honesty, the interplay between belief and certainty, proximity to unbelievers, divinely-inspired worldly order, susceptibility to false beauties, the love of neighbor, and obedience. Read More

Theodore Vial calls religion and race “conjoined twins” in the first line of his recent book, Modern Religion, Modern Race. These two concepts were born together and became key conceptual categories that have shaped the modern world. Read More

The prophetic witness of Martin Luther King Jr. did not arise spontaneously, social ethicist Gary Dorrien argues in his new book Breaking White Supremacy. Instead, the activism and ministry of King and other civil rights leaders was part of a long tradition of the black social gospel. Read More