To See the Promised Land: The Faith Pilgrimage of Martin Luther King, Jr.
| By author: | Downing |
Product Code:
H189
ISBN:
9780865542075
Product Format:
Hardback
Not currently available.
(Backorder policy) |
Price:
$35.00
In this study Frederick L. Downing sets out to tell the story of the pilgrimage of faith that led martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis and martyrdom. Drawing on his extensive researching primary documents from the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and the king Collection at Boston University, Professor Downing argues that Dr. King understood himself first as “a Baptist preacher” whose religious faith was so real and “closely knit to life” that he could not separate his life from his faith. Religion fro Dr. King was life, Professor Downing insists, reinforcing his research and his conclusions with the psychosocial theories of Erik Erikson and the categories for tracing the development of religious faith proposed by James Fowler. Professor Downing’s moving portrait of Martin Luther King as homo religious in twentieth-century America will endure as a testimony to the transforming power of religion in human experience.
Biographers have investigated and celebrated Dr. King’s activities and accomplishments as a leader and spokesman for civil rights, world peace, and the eradication of hunger and poverty. Others have attempted, as intellectual historians, to trace the development of Dr. King’s thought. These are worthy endeavors. Yet Dr. King was more than a politician and political strategists, more than a philosopher and intellectual reformer. He was a preacher and, in that self-defined role, a prophet on a pilgrimage of faith.