Speaker will explore role of black church

MOUNT VERNON — The Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., will discuss the intersection of faith and social justice on Thursday, April 10, at Cornell College.

Warnock will give Cornell’s Small-Thomas Lecture on the legacies of King Jr. and Coretta Scott King and the continuing role of the black church in social justice movements. The event, at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons, is free and open to the public.

Licensed and ordained at the historic Sixth Avenue Baptist Church of Birmingham, Ala., Warnock first served the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City and Baltimore’s Douglas Memorial Community Church. .

As a student at Morehouse College, he organized and served as the keynote speaker at a peace vigil protesting the first war against Iraq. During the 1992 Democratic Convention, he coordinated an alternative “People’s Convention” in memory of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper who told the nation in 1968 she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

His writing and research interests include the activist ministries of the 20th-century martyrs Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Warnock is sought after as a preacher and a scholar. Among his numerous awards are the1993 Union Theological Seminary’s William H. Hudnut Preaching Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and various other civic and social organizations. The Small-Thomas Lecture Series, which began in 2000, is funded by Richard Small, a past chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees and a 1950 graduate, and his wife, honorary alumna and trustee Norma Thomas Small. Previous speakers have included Sean Farren, a key negotiator in efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland, Edwina Gately, a Catholic laywoman from England who founded a haven for prostitutes in Chicago, and U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill.