Students anticipate conversation with controversial religious leader

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., Barack Obama’s former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ and a controversial figure in the presidential campaign, will be the featured speaker at the University’s Race and Religion workshop Tuesday, Feb. 10 in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

Elizabeth Davenport, Dean of Rockefeller Chapel, will open the workshop at 4:15 p.m., with introductory remarks.

Wright, an alumnus of the Divinity School (A.M.,’75) and pastor at Trinity for more than three decades before his retirement last May, will give a 40-minute presentation. Karl Lampley, a Divinity School Ph.D. student and a coordinator of the Race and Religion workshop, will the moderate a 30-minute question-and-answer session.

The Race and Religion workshop is a student-run forum for the discussion of questions related to race and religion. The workshop, which meets twice each month, enables students to present and discuss their work, and to hear guest lecturers who are alumni of the Divinity School.

Asking Wright to speak was motivated by curiosity, said College third-year Angelica Chestleigh, also a coordinator of the workshop. “We were interested in hearing what he had to say about the Obama controversy. And we felt it would be a very interesting conversation.”
Also this year, the Race and Religion workshop coordinators will welcome the renowned religious ethicist, Peter Paris (A.M.,’69, Ph.D,’75), professor of Christian social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, and Andrea White, (Ph.D,’08) who now is a professor of theology and culture at Emory University.