HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Author Kozol To Speak at Memorial Church

Jonathan Kozol '58, author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, will speak at the Memorial Church on Thursday, April 11, at 7:15 p.m. The talk is free and open to the public. Religious leaders in the Boston area are especially invited to attend, as well as members of the Harvard community.

In his most recent book, Kozol searched out ministers and churches as well as parents, teachers, and children in the South Bronx to learn about spiritual life and urban America.

"These children brought me back to religion," he has said. "I didn't think of it this way at first, but I now believe that if you're seeking God, you have to look in the eyes of a child. A lot of younger children speak with a transcendent beauty and charm and innocence that can take your breath away."

Kozol will speak about the religious sentiments that went into the writing of Amazing Grace, and the religious and moral questions that are raised by it: What is it like for children to grow up in the nation's poorest congressional district? What is it that enables some of them to pray? When they pray, what do they say to God?

"The churches in this neighborhood are a blessed sanctuary," Kozol has said. One of the South Bronx parishes that figures prominently in his book is St. Ann's Episcopal Church, where the pastor is the Rev. Martha Overall '69. "She is my idea of a modern saint," Kozol said in one recent interview. "She asked for the poorest ministry in New York City."

In Amazing Grace, Kozol writes: "Saddened by the streets, I am repeatedly attracted into churches. I search them out, and although some of the pastors speak of politics and strategies of change, it is not their politics that I am really seeking, but their company. Many, in their conversations, cite the gospels.

"When I mention I am Jewish, they have often gone out of their way to draw upon Isaiah and Ezekiel and the other prophets. Meeting these men and women is a stirring experience for me. They are among the most unselfish people I have ever known. Many really do see Jesus in the faces of the poorest people who they serve."

The Rev. Gregory Groover of Charles Street AME Church in Roxbury, who was interviewed for the book while he was pastor of Bright's Temple AME in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, and Gloria White-Hammond, MD, a second-year student in the Master of Divinity degree program at the Divinity School, will respond to Kozol's remarks. A booksigning in the Buttrick Room of the Memorial Church will follow his talk.

Kozol is the author of many bestselling and critically acclaimed books about America's most pressing social problems, including Death at an Early Age, Savage Inequalities, Illiterate America, and Rachel and Her Children: Homeless Families in America.

The April 11 event is cosponsored by the Office of Ministerial Studies at the Divinity School and the Memorial Church.