Featuring Jonathan L. Walton, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, and Professor of Religion and Society, HDS

In this continuing series, faculty members explore their intellectual and spiritual autobiographies with attention to the ways in which they have intersected, cohered, collided, and deepened over the course of their careers. From these presentations and the ensuing conversations, we hope to identify some of the key intellectual, spiritual, and physical practices we all might develop to remain supple and responsive to the...

African American Religions Lecture Series

Lecturer: J. Kameron Carter, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke Divinity School

Title: "The Sovereignty Machine: Fugitive Thoughts on Race and Political Theology"

Sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Department of African and African American Studies, and the Memorial Church of Harvard University

James Carroll, award winning author and columnist for The Boston Globe, will deliver the 2014 Paul Tillich Lecture, entitled  “Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and the Future of Jesus Christ.”

Read “Who Am I To Judge?” — James Carroll’s recent profile of Pope Francis for The New Yorker.

James Carroll is author of ten novels and seven works of non-fiction, including the National Book Award winning An American Requiem; the New York Times bestselling Constantine’s Sword, now an acclaimed documentary; House of War, which won the first PEN-Galbraith Award; and Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, which was named a 2011 Best Book by Publishers Weekly. His Boston Globe columns were honored with the 2012 Scripps Howard Award for Best Commentary. He lectures widely, both in the United States and abroad. In 2014, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish his eleventh novel, Warburg in Rome, and Viking will publish Christ Actually: The Son of God for The Secular Age, his eighth work of non-fiction.

"Approaching the Ledge: Why America needs a crisis of faith — and why, in order to save religion, we must be willing to let it die."

Listen to the Lecture (stream)

Joshua DuBois will explore the idea that we live in a time where faith exists without crisis, a coddled religious environment where God is not trusted to do God-sized things. As a result, some of the most significant social, political, and moral challenges we confront as a nation remain unsolved. Profiling leaders who have embraced deep crises of faith in the past — from the Civil Rights Movement to the present day — Mr. DuBois will plot a crisis-driven way forward that might finally address some of the most intractable problems we face.

Joshua DuBois,  former Special Assistant to President Obama and Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and author of The President's Devotional, will present  the 2014 William Belden Noble Lecture. Free admission.

The President’s Devotional: The Daily Readings that Inspired President Obama
Joshua DuBois, Former Executive Director of the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships

*Faith and Life Forum will take place this morning in the main sanctuary. Professor David Gergen, Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School, will interview Mr. DuBois. Joshua Dubois is the 2014 William Belden Noble Lecturer.