A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life [Hardcover]

Catherine Tumber (Editor), Walter E. Fluker (Editor), Howard Thurman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1998

A spiritual advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr.; the first black dean at a white university; cofounder of the first interracially pastored, intercultural church in the United States, Howard Thurman offered a transcendent vision of our world. This lyrical collection of select published and unpublished works traces his struggle with the particular manifestations of violence and hatred that mark the twentieth century. His words remind us all that out of religious faith emerges social responsibility and the power to transform lives.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Howard Thurman is hard to lionize because he's hard to categorize. He was a minister to Martin Luther King Jr. and an academic at Boston University, and he has been posthumously interpreted as a mystic, a political visionary, and a model of parish ministry. "Human life is one and all men are members of one another," Thurman wrote. "And this insight is spiritual and it is the hard core of religious experience." Such statements make him as useful to black Baptists as he is to white Unitarians, which probably explains why his writings have not been packaged by the niche-marketing-obsessed publishing industry as well as they should have been--until now. A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life, an anthology edited by Walter Earl Fluker and Catherine Tumber, collects Thurman's meditations on everything from the universal vocational dilemma (in an essay called "What Shall I Do with My Life?") to his specific observations on the legacy of Dr. King (in a radio obituary delivered on the evening of King's assassination). Among the most striking and original aspects of Thurman's faith is his insistence on the political significance of Christian mystical experience. In essays such as "The Fellowship Church of All Peoples," he shows how a mystical experience of human unity can strengthen an individual's moral imagination in a way that has precise political consequences. In a world where public life often dismisses religion as personal affective disorder, Thurman's writings may fuel a purging and productive fire in the bones. --Michael Joseph Gross

From Library Journal

This collection of writings, selected from The Sound of the Genuine: The Papers of Howard Thurman (a three-volume documentary edition forthcoming from South Carolina University Press), presents Thurman (1899-1981) as the spiritual adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., the first black dean of Boston University's Chapel, and an influential public intellectual in his own right. Thurman's challenges, regarding such themes as America's search for its soul, the potential of a democratic community, and the impact of self-disciplined love for the world, illuminate the common ground he strove passionately to create. Some 154 notes provide excellent historical context. Recommended for all public libraries and specialized collections in American history, religious development, and civil rights.?Leroy Hommerding, Citrus Cty Lib. System, Inverness, FL
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807010561
• ISBN-13: 978-0807010563
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,058,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thurman: Mystic for Today, December 26, 1998

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Nanci "Book Dragon" (Tri-Cities, WA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life (Hardcover)

I first became acquainted with the work of Howard Thurman when I found a leather-bound copy of Disciplines of the Spirit at an antique store. I was struck first by the practicality of his work, and then by the universality of his vision of spirituality and brotherhood. I am very excited to find this volume of his essays published. I hope it brings to many in 1999 and the millenium the practical, down-to-earth theology of this man who was a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King