Browse Lecture Series (35 total)

The Mysticism and Social Action collection is a series of recordings from the Lawrence Lecture at Berkeley Unitarian Church in California in 1978. In this collection, Thurman illustrates different understandings of mysticism and his own childhood mystical experiences. For Thurman, mystical experience is not an endpoint in religious experience, but rather opens up towards involvement in the social world. Thurman's lecture is also followed by a Q&A discussion in which Thurman touches on related…

Various sermons, meditations, and readings related to holidays and national holidays.

In this series delivered at Fellowship Church from March 9 to March 30, 1953, Thurman discusses encountering the divine in our everyday lives. Thurman finds God's logic in moments of personal crisis and chaos, as well as in our encounters with human need. Both crisis and human need can be dealt with at a surface level, but Thurman highlights the necessity of dealing with them at a deeper level – the level of religion. Do we dare search for God in our darkest moments? Do we have eyes to see the…

For Howard Thurman, community is the will of God and the intent of life. All of life moves towards a greater sense of wholeness and fulfillment. In this sermon series, Thurman explores the various manifestations of this urge towards community in human life: creation myths, the innocence of childhood, human beings as children of nature, and the utopian dreams of prophets. Ultimately, Thurman illustrates that God is on the side of harmony, and that we as human beings have the opportunity to…

"All that a man has is his life." This is the central insight explored in the Disciples of Christ Retreat collection. Throughout these lectures, Thurman discusses the dynamics of commitment in religious experience. A person has a life, and that life must be given to something. Thurman describes commitment as life giving itself to life, which summons up energy and meaning into our private worlds, and enabling new possibilities in our outer lives. For Thurman, the process of yielding to God in our…

In this series about the Search for Meaning, Thurman discusses approaches to finding meaning in things to which we choose to devote our lives and energy through the experiences of self, freedom, and love.

In this sermon series, Howard Thurman illustrates the all-encompassing nature of religious experience. The encounter with God is a renewing experience in which one's very center is changed, rippling out into all of one's life. It is in this whole-bodied commitment that one comes into the creativity and responsibility of ethical life. This sermon series contains a number of Thurman's most familiar images, i.e. the inward sea, the sound of the genuine, etc.

Toward the end of Thurman's life he held "sessions for spiritual renewal" through the Howard Thurman Educational Trust. These sessions were for emerging African American leaders around the United States who were open to "examine the bearing of these elements on the life and the fulfillment of those of us whose roots are in the Black community" (Against the Hounds of Hell, Eisenstadt, p. 376). These seminars were dynamic spaces of reading and reflection, with Thurman often reading a gospel text…

"[Jesus and the Disinherited] is the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic's lifelong attemot to bring the harrowing beauty of the African-American experience into deep engagement with what he called 'the religion of Jesus.' Ultimately his goal was to offer this humanizing combination as the basis for an emancipatory way of being, moving toward a fundamentally unchained life that is available to all the women and men everywhere who hunger and thirst for righteousness, especially those 'who…