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NTU Faith: Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day

More Than a Dreamer: Reclaiming King's Call for a Radical Revolution.

Conferences | Public lectures | Seminars

NTU Faith invite you to the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day event featuring several exceptional speakers who will reclaim and reassert King’s radical revolutionary values.

  • From: Monday 16 January 2023, 5.30 pm
  • To: Monday 16 January 2023, 7.30 pm
  • Location: Newton Building, LT3, City Campus, Goldsmith Street, NG1 4BU
  • Booking deadline: Monday 16 January 2023, 4.30 pm
  • Download this event to your calendar

Past event

Event details

In two complementary lectures, Professor Guy Nave and Professor Sharon Monteith will reclaim and reassert King’s radical revolutionary values, for how they were perceived during his life and for how they may pertain now.

They will reflect on how mythologizing this iconic civil rights activist may contribute to an under-appreciation of the radical vision and agenda for racial and social change that Martin Luther King Jr. espoused— and championed to his death in 1968.

This event is open to all NTU staff and students.

Programme

Agenda

Time 

Contribution   

Name 

5.30pm

Welcomes

Clive Foster

5.35pm

Life of Dr MLK Jr

Faith Ambassador Reflections

5.40pm

NTU Black Leadership Programme

Reuel Blair

5.50pm

Speaker 1 - Lecture

Professor Guy Nave

6.30pm

Speaker 2 - Lecture

Professor Sharon Monteith

7.10pm

Question and Answer

Clive Foster

7.20pm

Closing Remarks

Clive Foster

Speakers Biography

Professor Sharon Monteith


Sharon Monteith is Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History in the School of Arts and Humanities. Her research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust in the form of a Major Research Fellowship, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, and in the US by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Center for Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. She has published widely on social justice, from Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (1999) to SNCC’s Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South (2020), which won the the American Studies Network Book Prize awarded by the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) and the C. Hugh Holman Book Award presented by the US-based Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL).

On its fiftieth anniversary, she co-organized a conference in Washington DC, Staging a Dream: Untold Stories and Transatlantic Legacies of the March on Washington, that brought historians together with activists who attended on August 28, 1963, in order to uncover hidden stories behind the historic event where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke not only of his “dream” of racial equality but also of the how African Americans were still expected to live on an “island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” and to suffer “the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”


Professor Guy Nave

The Reverend Dr. Guy Nave, Jr is a Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. His research focuses on the intersections of religion and social justice. Dr. Nave is currently working on the development of what he is calling “Interfaith Liberation Theology.” Nave argues in many of his publications and presentations that liberation theology developed in the mid-1960s as a movement within Christianity. Christian liberation theologians assert that Christian scriptures clearly depict God as advocating on behalf of poor and oppressed people and that “salvation” in the Bible is not about receiving deliverance in some afterlife where Christians spend eternity in heaven with God. Instead, salvation represents deliverance (on earth) from all forms of social oppression.

While the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian Baptist minister, he was often joined and influenced by Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu religious leaders in his advocacy for human freedom and his understanding of God and God’s relation to justice and equity. For Nave, King was not only an example of a Christian liberation theologian, but his ministry also pointed to what the makings of an interfaith liberation theology might look like.

While King is most frequently associated with his “I Have a Dream” speech, Nave argues that King was a liberation theologian who did more than “dream” of a just world, he boldly challenged the injustices of his day that prevented such a world, and he suffered persecution and even assassination because of it. Nave believes that honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. involves more than “dreaming” of a just world, it entails a willingness to confront systems and structures of injustice and inequity—just as King did—in order to create such a world.

Location details

Address:

Newton Building, LT3
City Campus
Goldsmith Street
 NG1 4BU

Past event

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