Join us next Tuesday, February 26th, for Paul Metzger’s Trinity Symposium lecture titled Downward Mobility and Trickle-Up Economics: A Trinitarian Reflection on Money and Power.

Metzger has an MDiv from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Deerfield, IL), and a PhD from King’s College London (London, UK). He now teaches Christian Theology and Theology of Culture at Multnomah University (Portland, OR). He has been the Director of New Wine, New Wineskins since 1999, an organization that seeks to heighten the awareness of people and the communities they serve to the pressing concerns facing contemporary culture.

Metzger’s published works include Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church (Eerdmans, 2007), and Exploring Ecclesiology: An Evangelical and Ecumenical Introduction (co-authored with Brad Harper; Brazos, 2009).

Don’t miss this opportunity to listen to Dr. Metzger in TEDS chapel and in the luncheon afterwards at Hinkson Hall. If you’re not on campus, you can also join us online via stream.tiu.edu. We hope to see you there.

After the Trinity Symposia event hosting Michael Emerson, many of you asked us for the powerpoint he used in his presentation. You can find it in our Media page, or you can download it here. We hope you enjoyed Emerson’s lecture and we thank you for joining us in such an important conversation regarding race and the church. We’re looking forward to see you again soon.

Last February we were sad to announce that Emerson’s lecture had to be postponed for health reasons. For all of you who were hoping to attend, the time has come!

Next Thursday the Henry Center along with TEDS is hosting Michael Emerson as part of the Trinity Symposia series. Dr. Emerson has specialized on the role of race in shaping social action in the United States, recently by focusing on health, residential segregation, and on the institution of religion. He is a professor from the Sociology Department at Rice University (Houston, TX), and the Director of the Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity (PS-ARE), a study that provides one of the nation’s richest data sets for understanding religious life within racial and ethnic communities.

His work, which includes “Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America” (2001 Distinguished Book of the Year by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion) and “People of The Dream: Multiracial Congregations on the United States” has won several awards and recognitions.

Join us for this awaited lecture next Thursday October 25 at 11:00am in TIU chapel. At 12:00pm there will be a luncheon at Hinkson Hall where you will be able to interact with Dr. Emerson. If you can’t make it, you can still connect live with us online (lecture only) via www.tiuproductions.com.

See you there!

How Race Works, and Why it Matters for the Church

The Henry Center invites students, pastors, and all interested parties to join an exciting two-part conversation on the TEDS campus — “Jonathan Edwards and Race in America: Two Conversations.” In an earlier blog post, we mentioned that on Feb 1 Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile will be speaking on Jonathan Edwards and American Racism (for details, see the previous blog post).

On the following day, Feb 2, Professor Michael Emerson will continue this important conversation about race and religion. Dr. Emerson is a sociology professor at Rice University and co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. He has written important works on the relationship between race and religion. Some of his well-known books are Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (co-authored with Christian Smith; Oxford University Press, 2000), which was named the 2001 Distinguished Book of the Year by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is also the author of People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States, published by Princeton University Press in 2006.

Dr. Emerson will speak in the ATO chapel on Thursday, Feb 2, at 11am on: “How Race Works, and Why it Matters for the Church.” His talk will be based on Ephesians 6:12. After chapel, there will be a free luncheon for all in attendance. Dr. Peter Cha, associate professor of pastoral theology at TEDS, will moderate a conversation with Dr. Emerson and the audience. A TEDS alumnus, Rev. Peter Hong, will also be a part of that conversation. He is a second-generation Korean American who planted a multiracial church in Chicago ten years ago. The church is called New Community Covenant Church and now has about 600 members.

After the luncheon is over (1pm), interested local church pastors and other students can remain for a longer conversation with the speakers (till about 2pm).