Center for Reconciliation Leads Week of Discussion, Worship, Reflection

Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation led its first Teaching Communities Week Nov. 4-7. The event brings a leading practitioner and a theologian, each dedicated to Christian reconciliation in a divided world, to teach together at the Divinity School and to engage local churches and ministries.

John Perkins (l) speaks with Charles Marsh (r)

This year’s keynote speakers were John Perkins, Mississippi civil rights activist and founder of the Christian Community Development Association, and Charles Marsh, professor of religion at the University of Virginia and author of “The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today.”

Although Marsh’s writing focuses on Perkins’s work as a legacy of the civil rights movement, this was the first time the two have spoken together.

The week’s events included a joint presentation and faculty panel discussion, “America’s Unfinished Business: Justice, Reconciliation, the Church, and Post-Civil Rights America;” a workshop in Durham hosted by St. John’s Baptist Church and attended by more than 100 students and church and community leaders; a breakfast with divinity students; and a lecture and Bible study hosted by local churches.

Presentations by Perkins and Marsh from the week will form the basis of one of the books in the Center for Reconciliation’s forthcoming new book series, “Resources for Reconciliation,” which will be published by InterVarsity Press.

Speakers for next year’s Teaching Communities Week in November 2008 will be Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche Communities, and Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School.   

A preacher-activist, Perkins was born to a sharecropping family. He has pioneered church-based community development among the poor for more than 40 years and is the author of “Let Justice Roll Down” and “Beyond Charity.” Perkins chairs the Christian Community Development Association—7,000 people and 600 ministries and congregations across the United States dedicated to rebuilding broken communities.

Marsh, director of the Project on Lived Theology at UVA, is the author of “The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights Movement to Today” and “God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights.”