Episode #19
Howard Thurman and the Disinherited w. Dr Paul Harvey
Howard Thurman knew the real battle starts inside you. Before you can change the world, can you face your own fear, hypocrisy, and hunger for approval? Historian Dr. Paul Harvey joins Steve Schallert and Jarrod McKenna to trace the life, mysticism, and revolutionary influence of one of the 20th century’s most important spiritual thinkers. Thurman’s story is astonishing: born into poverty in segregated Florida, shaped by a grandmother who had been enslaved, mentored by the people and ideas that formed Black religious life, and later propelled into conversations with Quakers, Gandhi, and the architects of the American freedom movement. Harvey reveals how Thurman’s inner life was forged by hardship, why trees, storms, and the silence mattered so much to his spirituality, and how those influences became the foundation for a vision of liberation that still challenges the church today. Harvey also brings Thurman into the present moment, connecting his warnings about hatred, fear, and dehumanisation to our own age of outrage and exhaustion. This is not just a biography lesson - it is a bracing invitation to recover the contemplative depth social movements desperately need if they are going to last. Essential listening if you care about spirituality, justice, nonviolence, or the question Thurman kept asking: Who are you really? ABOUT DR. PAUL HARVEY Paul Harvey is Distinguished Professor of History and Presidential Teaching Scholar at UCCS. Harvey is the recipient of the James W. C. Pennington Award from the Heidelberg Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, given to scholars who have done distinguished work on slavery, emancipation, peace, education, reform, civil rights, and religion; and is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism at UCCS. He researches, writes, and teaches in the field of American history from the 16th century to the present. He is the author/editor of thirteen books and numerous articles. Most recently, Paul Harvey is the author of Martin Luther King: A Religious Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), and Howard Thurman Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography (Eerdmans Press, 2020), as well as Christianity and Race in the American South: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Bounds of Their Habitation: Religion and Race in American History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Professor Harvey’s recent co-authored book The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, was named a “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Title” by Choice magazine in 2013, an award selected from among the several thousand academic books published in the previous year. FOLLOW US @goodonwood.podcast @ststephensuniversity @jfi_ssu @steveschallert @jarrodmckenna
