Browse Lecture Series (35 total)

"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…

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…

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…

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

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…

We Believe was a color television program that aired on WHDH-TV, Channel 5, in Boston on weekday mornings at 11:15. From 1958 to 1965, while Howard Thurman was Dean of the Chapel at Boston University, he was the host of the Friday morning show. Each message has a brief introductory section with bells and music before Thurman delivers his short meditation. Some recordings have been edited to remove the intro. In some cases, the Howard Thurman Educational Trust produced tapes with two messages on…

KNBC was the call sign for NBC's radio broadcast station in San Franscisco from 1947 to 1962."Dr. Thurman, the pastor of San Francisco's intercultural and interracial Fellowship Church, recently inaugurated a weekly program of spiritual "Meditations" on KNBC (Sundays, 10:00 -10:15 a.m., PST)"[Description from NBC Chimes (January 1953) archived in American Radio History]

This collection contains a two-part interview between Miriam Rogers and Sue Bailey Thurman. In this interview, Thurman explores the lives of Phyllis Wheatley and Amos Fortune, two black people brought to Boston on slave ships, presenting their lives of thought and action as exemplary of democracy and freedom in America. Thurman also talks briefly about the life of Harriet Tubman, and other current events, including: the growing influence of Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence, and readings from…

In this series, Howard Thurman discusses the Declaration of Independence along four key ideas: Created Equal, Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness. Each of the four sermons explores one of these ideas. These sermons are also available at Expanding Common Ground, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University

This collection includes an audio recording of part one of Howard Thurman's 1969 interview with Roberta Byrd Barr, originally aired in three parts with the title "A Creative Encounter" on Seattle-based KING-TV. All three parts of the interview are available on the Virtual Listening Room site by Boston University.