Howard Thurman: Jesus—An Interpretation

Join us for our new book study in the combined All Saints Episcopal / Open Table United Church of Christ adult education class. This week, read the Forward, the Preface, and Chapter 1.

For the next 5 weeks we will study Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, a seminal 1940’s book which greatly influenced Martin Luther King.

Howard Washington Thurman (1899–1981) played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. He was one of the principal architects of the modern, nonviolent civil rights movement.

What does Jesus offer to a people who live with their backs against the wall? This is the question with which Howard Thurman began his landmark work, Jesus and the Disinherited, in 1949. The work became an intellectual pillar for the burgeoning civil rights movement in the 1950s. Howard Thurman, an unorthodox mystic and prophet, served as a spiritual mentor to civil rights leaders in the mid-century black freedom struggle. Until recently, Thurman’s work was not as widely known or studied among white Christian communities as it deserved to be. But our current historical moment offers new impetus to return to this spiritual giant and particularly to his seminal work on Jesus.