Department
of Religious Studies
Lewis V.
Baldwin
Professor of Religious Studies
Dr. Baldwin is a native of Camden, Alabama. He received his early
education in the public schools of Wilcox County, the heart of the
so-called Alabama Blackbelt, where he participated in student
demonstrations and other civil rights activities in the 1960s. He
graduated from Camden Academy High School in 1967.
During the height of the civil rights and black power movement,
Dr. Baldwin matriculated at Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama. He
received a B.A. degree in History from that institution in 1971. He
then studied at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School/Bexley Hall/Crozer
Theological Seminaries in Rochester, New York, where he was awarded
the M.A. degree in Black Church Studies in 1973 and the M.Div. degree
in Theology in 1975. In 1980, he received the Ph.D. degree in
American Christianity from Northwestern University, Evanston,
Illinois.
An ordained Baptist minister who has preached throughout the
United States, Dr. Baldwin has also established himself as a
professor and scholar with a growing reputation. He has taught at
Wooster College in Ohio, Colgate University in New York,
Colgate-Rochester Divinity School in New York, Fisk University, and
American Baptist College in Nashville, and is now a Professor in
Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
He is the author of some sixty articles and several books, among
which are "Invisible" Strands in African Methodism: A History of
the African Union Methodist Protestant and Union American Methodist
Episcopal Churches, 1805-1980 (1983); The Mark of a Man:
Peter Spencer and the African Union Methodist Tradition (1987);
There is a Balm in Gilead: The Cultural Roots of Martin Luther
King, Jr. (1991); To Make the Wounded Whole: The Cultural
Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1992); Freedom is Never
Free: A Biographical Portrait of E.D. Nixon, Sr. (1992); and
Toward the Beloved Community: Martin Luther King, Jr. and South
Africa(1995). His "Invisible" Strands in African
Methodism won the American Theological Library Association
Award, and his There is a Balm in Gilead won the Midwest
Book Achievement Award of the Midwest Independent Publishers
Association.
Dr. Baldwin contributed substantially to two major works which
appeared in published form in 2002. They are Between the Cross and
the Crescent: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Malcolm and
Martin, co-authored by Baldwin and Amiri YaSin Al-Hadid; and
The Boundaries of Law, Politics, and Religion: Revisiting the
Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Baldwin.
Dr. Baldwin is currently working on several major publications.
They include God of Our Silent Tears: Sermons from the Depths of
the Human Spirit; The Harmonies of Liberty: Malcolm X and
the Black Nationlist Tradition; Slave Thought: The Contours
of a Folk Theology; In the Backwaters of African Methodism: Small
Black Methodist Denominations, 1805-2005; Standing in John's
Shoes: The Black Preacher and the Folk Sermon; and The World
as Parish: John Wesley and the Oppressed.
Last Updated: Sept. 17, 1999