Monday, March 16, 2020, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

KIPTON JENSEN, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Director of the Leadership Studies Program in the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership, Morehouse College

“Howard Thurman: ‘Tutor to the World’”

Howard Thurman (1899-1981) is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement in America. Having met with Gandhi in 1936, he quickly appropriated and adeptly applied the philosophy of nonviolence to the problem of racism in America, eventually and memorably mentoring Martin Luther King in his application of that philosophy. However, as Kipton Jensen demonstrates in his most recent work, Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground (2019), the reach of this extraordinary man’s thinking extended to an entire generation of activists, making him the man his wife has described as a “tutor to the world.” Himself an activist as well as a philosopher, he preached the power of the love that can get us past hatred, through reconciliation, and into a peaceful and productive life shared on “common ground.” And, speaking of preaching, Kipton will also discuss Thurman’s Sermons on the Parables, subject of another book that he recently co-edited with Emory (and Oxford) professor of religion, David Gowler.