Religion in public life

The Explorations in Black Leadership speaker series brings Rev. Robert M. Franklin to U.Va. March 26. Franklin will speak on “Tough Love: How Religion Enriches and Complicates American Public Life” at 5 p.m. in Minor Hall Auditorium.

Franklin is the president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, the nation’s foremost center of African-American theological education. The author of the 1997 book, Another Day’s Journey: Black Churches Confronting the American Crisis, Franklin urges church communities to help solve the country’s social problems. He also wrote Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African-American Thought, examining the ethical work of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

A Chicago native born in 1954, he went to Morehouse College in Atlanta and the University of Durham, England. After getting his Master’s in Divinity from Harvard, he returned to the University of Chicago for his Ph.D. He has held a dozen academic and religious posts over the past 23 years, including working for the Ford Foundation’s Rights and Social Justice Program.

U.Va. panelists Julian Bond, professor of history, and Wallace Best, professor of religious studies, will comment on Franklin’s talk, which is sponsored by the Institute for Public History, the Center for Religion and Democracy and the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. A reception will follow in Minor Hall lobby.