The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age

Short Thoughts: This is a book about King's three years at Crozier Seminary (starting when he was 19). This is an area I had not really read about previously and I believe it is the only book directly looking at this time period. The broader look at the curriculum and his life and development was helpful.

There were two larger contributions I think. One was King's romance with a White woman (the daughter of the campus cook who was King's age.) King eventually broke the romance off because of concerns about how it would be received and how that would impact his life (and his ability to serve the church in the south).

The second helpful contribution is an exploration of King's plagiarism. That he plagiarized is well documented, here and other places. But I think that Parr also helps places that in context. There is no point where Parr can point to a professor either calling him on the plagiarism or on real teaching about plagiarism being taught. I think this is a weakness still in pastoral training. I never had any discussion of plagiarism in the context of preaching during seminary. That doesn't excuse King, but it was a different era. King's papers at the time where mostly handwritten and there were no tools to easily check papers for plagiarism as there is today.

The weakness, pointed out in the most critical review on Amazon was that this does not explore the Black community outside of Crozier. The book explores individual Black actors but not the broader community. King preached frequently at local black churches. The content of his sermons is discussed, the income generated is discussed, the invitations being at least partially about the respect for King's father is discussed. But the actual community is not really discussed.


My longer thoughts on are my blog at http://bookwi.se/the-seminarian/