Rekindling A Prophetic Moral Vision for Justice
Willie Jennings
89.42
6 February 2017
25 September 2025
William Barber, founder of Moral Monday Movement and president of the North Carolina NAACP, spoke at Yale Divinity School on the evening of Friday, February 3rd 2017, for a public conversation with YDS Prof. Willie Jennings on building a prophetic moral vision for justice. The conversation was convened by Associate Dean William Goettler and comes as part of the School's new program in Transformational Leadership for Church and Society. Known for his electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Barber is a leader in a movement to build a progressive agenda and a moral framework that counters the conservative religious constructs dominating the public square. "To repair the breaches caused by centuries old systems of racial and gender inequality," Barber writes, "we need clergy and lay leaders who will dedicate their lives to rebuilding, raising up and repairing our moral infrastructure." Joining Barber is Willie Jennings, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at YDS. Jennings' book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (link is external) (Yale 2010) won the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. Barber served as the lecturer for a weekend-intensive course, "Rekindling a Prophetic Moral Vision for Justice."
