Listening for the Sound of the Genuine: Race, Religion and Renewal in the Life of Rev. Dr. Paul Smith

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This is the life story of a man who has learned to confront and subdue the anger and sorrow he feels over the ongoing tragedy of our country's racial politics. Schooled in the ethics and techniques of the civil rights era, Rev. Dr. Paul Smith is a translator between estranged people, a courageous healer of hatred, a man of God whose ministry knows no bounds. His story can teach us how to be the kind of people we need to be in order to live in a better world. After the fashion of his mentor, the visionary theologian Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, Rev. Smith has created vital, multiracial congregations in four different cities over the course of a 56-year career. Laying bare his thoughts, experiences, and emotions, this energetic orator has engendered conversations about race, class, and culture that have stretched across much of the country east of the Mississippi. He literally introduced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ambassador Andrew Young to each other in the late 1950s and went on to march with them in the 1960s. But unlike many of his more famous friends from "the movement, " Rev. Smith has continued that work in the pulpit and in the community, Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year. Dr. Paul, as he is often called, knows how to create the communal human experiences through which bigotry can be defused. For him, the front lines have often been in the congregation, the neighborhood, the police precinct, the boardroom, and the hospital. He has baptized, married, and eulogized people from all walks of life with equal concern and enthusiasm. Dr. Paul has overcome every type of boundary that might have separated him from his fellows. He has become a master mediator, and he can teach us something about how we can live together in understanding, equanimity, and grace.