John R. Lewis, civil rights leader, U.S. representative for Georgia’s fifth congressional district, will receive the Seminary’s Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life and deliver the Kuyper Prize Lecture to open the Seminary’s annual Kuyper Conference.
The conference theme for 2015 is “Faith and Race.” Plenary speakers include Dr. Yolanda Pierce, Princeton Seminary’s Elmer G. Homrighausen Associate Professor of African American Religion and Literature, and director of the Center for Black Church Studies, whose topic is “Blacker Than Coal: Race, Theological Language, and Power,” and Dr. Randal Jelks, professor of American studies and African and African American studies, The University of Kansas, and Distinguished Chair in Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Jelks’s topic is “Democratic Freedoms and Black Modernist Theology: A Revolutionary Intellectual Alternative.” In four concurrent sessions, scholars from Europe, the UK, Canada and the United States will take up various aspects of the conference theme, with a concluding panel on Saturday April 18.