Fortress Martin Luther King Jr. Collection (5 vols.)

by Martin Luther King Jr.; Lewis V. Baldwin; Wyatt T. Walker; Rufus Burrow Jr.

Publisher:

Fortress Press

, 1991–2014

Overview

Study the life and legacy of one of the twentieth century’s most influential individuals with these rigorous, yet readable volumes from Fortress Press. Examine the prayer life of one of the most influential spiritual leaders in American history and the impact of public prayer on the Civil Rights Movement. Explore the spiritual and cultural background of Martin Luther King, and its profound influence on his later life. Discover the theological underpinnings of Dr. King’s philosophy with two reflective pieces from the great civil-rights leader.

Key Features

• Examines the substance and impact of Martin Luther King Jr.’s prayer life
• Explores the spiritual and cultural background of Martin Luther King Jr.
• Includes two reflective pieces revealing the theological underpinnings of Dr. King’s philosophy

Product Details

• Title: Fortress Martin Luther King Jr. Collection
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Volumes: 5
• Pages: 1,178
• Resource Type: Monographs
• Topic: Church in North America

Extremist for Love: Martin Luther King Jr., Man of Ideas and Nonviolent Social Action

• Author: Rufus Burrow Jr.
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Pages: 250

Sample Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

In spite of extensive research and publishing on Martin Luther King Jr., insufficient attention has been given to the convergence of ideas and action in his life. In an era where people are often sorted into the categories of “thinker” and “doer,” King stands out—a rare mix of the deeply profound thinker and intellect who put the fruit of that reflection into the service of direct social action.

Rufus Burrow has shown that the roots of King’s ideas, nonviolent social protest, and socio-ethical practice are grounded in a family deeply rooted in black southern culture and the black Baptist church. His book convincingly argues that many watered those roots along the way, but those who planted the seeds and did the early nurturing were members of King’s family, educational, and faith communities. Burrow takes great care in helping us to see that the social gospel, Christian realist, and social protest influences on King provided the perfect soil for the formal influences of Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and Gandhi.

—Reginald C. Holmes, pastor, New Covenant Christian Church, Denver, Colorado

If you are interested in the fundamental ideas and ideals that shaped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then you need look no further than this spectacular book. This authoritative work is the most comprehensive to date on King as a person whose deep intellectual ideas and ideals were translated into transformational action that has altered the course of human history. Rufus Burrow highlights many aspects of King’s intellectual influences others tend to ignore or only present in a cursory manner. This is a landmark text for King scholarship and social ethics. You owe it to yourself to read this book!

—Nathaniel Holmes Jr., adjunct professor of religion, Florida Memorial University

Rufus Burrow Jr. offers the most comprehensive and detailed account to date of formal and informal influences on the ethical thought and social actions of Martin Luther King Jr. Excellent treatment of the contributions of his family, the black church, the black community, Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, Personalism, Gandhi and other philosophical and theological resources to King’s abundant repertoire of ideas and ideals for liberation work. A detailed account of King’s pilgrimage to nonviolence, nonviolence training, and a conclusive description of ways his nonviolence may be effective in the work of liberation today. There is research par excellence in primary resources with substantial footnotes as Dr. Burrow clears up many misconceptions of Dr. King’s thought and meticulously sets forth his own conclusions. I would highly recommend this book for any course on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

—Ervin Smith, emeritus professor of Christian ethics, Methodist Theological School in Ohio

Rufus Burrow Jr. is Indiana Professor of Christian Thought and professor of theological social ethics at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana.

To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

• Author: Lewis V. Baldwin
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 1992
• Pages: 344

Sample Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

To Make the Wounded Whole describes how Martin Luther King’s black messianic vision propelled him into fateful encounters with other black leaders, the war in Vietnam, black theology, and world liberation movements.

An important work! No interpreter has more comprehensively documented than Baldwin how King’s complex thought and personality provide the central fulcrum upon which contemporary African-American theological and ethical thought turns.

—Journal of the ITC

A difficult objective has been brilliantly achieved here. With the appearance of his work on Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin has earned a place among the most creative students of African-American religions, social and intellectual history.

—Sterling Stuckey, professor of history, University of California, Riverside

Lewis V. Baldwin is associate professor in religious studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King Jr.

• Authors: Lewis V. Baldwin and Wyatt T. Walker
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Pages: 176

Sample Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Based on years of original research, Never to Leave Us Alone is the first book-length treatment of the prayer life of the famed religious and civil rights leader. Drawing on personal prayers that King recited as a seminarian and graduate student, preacher, pastor, and then civil rights leader, award-winning historian Lewis Baldwin explains how King turned to both private prayer and meditation for his own spiritual fulfillment, and to public prayer as part of his discourse, as an aspect of his pastoral care, and as a way of moving, inspiring, and reaffirming people in the context of a crusade for equal rights, social justice, and peace.

In the end, Baldwin argues, King’s prayer life and reflections offer important keys not only to King the man but also to our own cultivation of core human values.

This intense probing of the prayer life of Martin Luther King Jr. by Lewis Baldwin brings depth and clarity to the concept of ‘praying without ceasing.’ In the tradition of an African griot, Baldwin unfolds the story of Dr. King, spirit–filled servant of God, who utilized the power of persistent prayer, plus a constant study of human inequities in an alien land and the search for truth, as all encompassing in the process of ‘witnessing for the Lord!’ This is not simply another collection of facts about the celebrated ‘peaceful warrior.’ It is a newly opened window into the heart and soul of a servant–preacher who continues to teach through his understanding and experience of the power of prayer. It should be required of all theological seminarians!

—Melva Costen, Helmar Emil Nielsen Professor Emerita of Worship and Music, Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta, Georgia

Lewis Baldwin is superbly qualified to give to us a view of the prayer life of Martin Luther King, the largely unknown, mighty force that propelled this man who led in giving America the opening to become a democracy.

—Gardner Taylor, pastor emeritus, Concord Baptist Church of Christ, Brooklyn

Lewis Baldwin, the foremost chronicler of Martin Luther King Jr., traces his prayer life and its huge, enabling force in the fight for human rights. A wonderful book! Read it, and you will be inspired.

—David Buttrick, Buffington Professor of Homiletics and Liturgics Emeritus, Vanderbilt University Divinity School

Lewis V. Baldwin is associate professor in religious studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

There Is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther King Jr.

• Author: Lewis V. Baldwin
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 1991
• Pages: 352

Sample Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

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.

Lewis Baldwin’s much-needed study will influence the black church and the black cultural heritage as well as provide an important starting point for understanding King.

—James H. Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York

. . . vibrant with stories, names, humor, music and all the richness of the Southern Black church and community.

—New York Times Book Review

Lewis V. Baldwin is associate professor in religious studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

The Measure of a Man

• Author: Martin Luther King Jr.
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication Date: 2010
• Pages: 56

Sample Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Eloquent and passionate, reasoned and sensitive, this pair of meditations by the revered civil-rights leader contains the theological roots of his political and social philosophy of nonviolent activism.

Martin Luther King Jr. was president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and copastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia. He was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1963 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.