The Unfinished Search For Common Ground: Reimagining Howard Thurman

This book aims to summarize the life and work of Howard Thurman while also stimulating Thurman scholars in their ongoing explorations of his importance. One of the leading religious figures of twentieth-century America, Thurman was one of the first prominent African American pacifists. He led the first delegation of African Americans to meet with Mahatma Gandhi in 1936, and his theology of radical nonviolence, outlined in Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists. And his insistence on the integrity and centrality of personal religious experience was communicated for a half-century in books, and through a personal presence, that continues to have an impact on religious thought and spiritual practice.

Walter Earl Fluker is Dean’s Professor of Spirituality, Ethics, and Leadership, Candler School of Theology, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Ethical Leadership, Boston University. Editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project, Dr. Fluker is an internationally regarded consultant, lecturer, and workshop leader. He is coeditor of the Orbis series “Walking with God: The Sermon Series of Howard Thurman,” which includes The Way of the Mystics, Moral Struggle and the Prophets, and Democracy and the Soul of America.