Check your local listings and watch the PBS documentary
“THE BLACK CHURCH: THIS IS OUR STORY, THIS IS OUR SONG”
on February 16 and 17, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. ET.
This moving four-hour, two-part series from executive producer, host and writer Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, traces the 400-year-old story of the Black church in America, all the way down to its bedrock role as the site of African American survival and grace, organizing and resilience, thriving and testifying, autonomy and freedom, solidarity and speaking truth to power.
In a recent interview with Stacey L. Holman, producer and director of this documentary, Dean Kelly Brown Douglas noted, “The Black faith tradition was not born out of a time of peace, and yet despite the attacks on black life, people were able to give birth to a faith that witnesses to the freedom and justice of God.”
“The Black faith tradition was not born out of a time of peace, and yet despite the attacks on black life, people were able to give birth to a faith that witnesses to the freedom and justice of God.” -Kelly Brown Douglas
Interviewees include Dean Kelly Brown Douglas of EDS at Union; Presiding Bishop Michael Curry of The Episcopal Church; media executive and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey; singer, songwriter, producer and philanthropist John Legend; singer and actress Jennifer Hudson; gospel legends Yolanda Adams, Pastor Shirley Caesar and BeBe Winans; civil rights leaders Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. William Barber II; scholar Cornel West; and many more.
Click here to read the full PBS press release: https://www.pbs.org/weta/black-church
About Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary
Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary nurtures moral leadership, focusing on theological education, spiritual formation, and community transformation. In 2017, EDS affiliated with Union Theological Seminary, creating EDS at Union. It has grown into a program of discernment of vocation, academic rigor, spiritual formation, and exposure to diverse opportunities for ministry. Students immerse themselves in a theologically and spiritually rigorous Anglican Studies program that reflects the global diversity of the Anglican Communion and the complex history of the church’s relationship to social injustice. They participate in a program geared toward cross-cultural racial and ethnic literacy. EDS at Union is guided by the vision and leadership of The Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, inaugural Dean of EDS at Union and the Bill and Judith Moyers Chair in Theology at Union.
About the Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas
The Very Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas is the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary (EDS at Union), as well as the Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral and Theologian in Residence at Trinity Church Wall Street. Douglas is a renowned faith leader and expert on the intersection between the Black church and various social justice and moral issues from voting rights to police reform. Douglas is widely published in national and international journals and other publications. Douglas’ ground-breaking books include Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015), Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (1999), The Black Christ (1994, 25th Anniversary edition 2019), and What’s Faith Got to Do with It?: Black Bodies/Christian Souls (2005).