There Is a Balm in Gilead

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 Working directly with the trove of King's sermons, speeches, and unpublished papers, Baldwin has reconstructed the pain and joy, the defeat and triumph King experienced in his formative family relationships, in the black church, in his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.

Author: Lewis V. Baldwin
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishing
Published: 01/05/1991
Pages: 364
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.12lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.54w x 0.91d
ISBN: 9780800624576

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 02/01/1991

About the Author
Baldwin, Lewis V.: -

Lewis V. Baldwin is emeritus professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. His works include, from Fortress Press, There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1991); To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992); and Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (2010).

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