This post comes as a congratulatory shout out to my colleague, good friend and brother, Jonathan L. Walton, on the occasion of his installation in Harvard's Memorial Church. What follows is Samuel Freedman's coverage in the New York Times of the broader significance of Jonathan's appointment -- as tenured faculty and minister -- for the landscape of Afro-Protestantism, in particular, and American Christianity, more generally, at this moment in time. Generational Shift in Black Christianity Comes to Harvard By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN Published: November 11, 2012
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — More than 60 autumns ago, a young Atlantan named Martin Luther King Jr. arrived to start graduate school at Boston University. There, he fell under the influence of a theologian, Howard Thurman, who taught him about Gandhian nonviolence. That concept became one of Dr. King’s guiding principles in the civil rights movement.
On a brilliant fall morning this Sunday, a torch of black Christianity was passed to another minister, scholar and son of Atlanta, who was born five years after Dr. King’s death, the Rev. Jonathan L. Walton. In a combined worship service and installation ceremony, Mr. Walton took on the position of Pusey minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard, a pulpit of importance inside and outside the university.
Mr. Walton’s appointment, which also includes an endowed professorship of Christian morals, forms part of a generational transition in the African-American church. Ministers and theologians who came of age during the civil rights era are being supplanted by those, like Mr. Walton, 39, of elite universities, the diversity movement and hip-hop culture. To underscore how much else has changed at Harvard, Mr. Walton was formally given the pulpit Sunday by Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s first female president...
To continue reading this story, go to: The New York Times