There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King Jr.: 1 - Softcover

Lewis V. Baldwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0800624572 ISBN 13: 9780800624576

Publisher: Fortress Press, 1991

Synopsis

The sources of Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s phenomenal and prophetic impact on life in America and beyond have never been adequately understood. In this path-breaking volume, Lewis Baldwin traces King's vision and activism not to his formal philosophical and theological development but directly to his roots in Southern black culture, where King spent most of his 39 years.King's appropriation of the Bible, Gandhi, American participatory democracy, Boston personalism, and the theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and the Social Gospel makes sense, Baldwin argues, only against his visceral and abiding identification with black culture and the black Christian tradition. Working directly with the trove of King's sermons, speeches, and unpublished papers, Baldwin has reconstructed the pain and joy, the defeat and triumph King experienced in his formative family relationships, in the black church, in his childhood and education, in his marriage and children, in segregated black Atlanta, and in his leadership of America's civil rights movement. Baldwin's through research and engaging writing finally give us what King had but Scholars have missed: the sense of place that grounded his vision of the "beloved community."

About this title

About the Author

<p><b>Lewis V. Baldwin</b> is professor emeritus of religious studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of <i>There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr.</i> (1991); <i>To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. </i>(1992); and <i>Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. </i>(2010).</p>

From the Back Cover

A major contribution to African-American religious scholarship and clearly the most significant analysis of King's cultural roots yet available in print.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0800624572
• ISBN 13: 9780800624576
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352