Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans

David Gowler integrates parable scholarship with extensive research on Howard Thurman’s life and writings to explore how Thurman’s insights about the Prodigal Son and Good Samaritan parables provide a way forward in our quest for community. An online teacher’s guide further explores how parables and visual art can heighten spiritual consciousness, demand an ethical response, and create and deepen community.

Endorsements

＂Gowler’s scholarship prepares us to enter Jesus’s parables with greater vision and understanding. Accompanied by Thurman’s insights and identification with Jesus as one of the disinherited, the parables’ transformative significance confronts every reader.＂
--Luther E. Smith, Jr., PhD, author, Howard Thurman: The Mystic as Prophet

＂David Gowler’s beautiful book Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community offers helpful insights into Thurman’s wisdom and how we can apply it to our own broken lives and world. A book well worth studying.＂
--Rev. John Dear, author of The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence, and director of BeatitudesCenter.org

＂David B. Gowler, one of our finest students of the parables, uses Thurman’s sermons on the parables as portals to the understanding of communal and collective interaction and the deep-lying layers of personal spiritual truths.＂
--Peter Eisenstadt, author of Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman, and affiliate professor of history, Clemson University

David B. Gowler is Pierce Chair of Religion at Oxford College of Emory University and senior faculty fellow at the Center for Ethics, Emory University. A prolific author of both academic and public scholarship, his books on the parables include What Are They Saying about the Parables?, Second Edition and The Parables after Jesus. He is also coeditor, with Kipton E. Jensen, of Howard Thurman: Sermons on the Parables.
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