MLK Professor Dale Andrews spoke at celebration
The Rev. Dale P. Andrews, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor, spoke at the University's celebration Monday.
The Rev. Dale P. Andrews, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology, spoke at the University’s celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 16. Andrews, an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, came to the University last fall from the Louisville Seminary.
The King professorship, a post within the University Professors Program assigned to the School of Theology, can be held by a distinguished African-American scholar in any theological discipline, says STH Dean Ray Hart. “King’s own scholarly field was Christian social ethics, but he was an equally distinguished preacher,” says Hart. “So when we had a senior appointment to make in homiletics and pastoral theology we determined that if the search produced a superior African-American candidate we would assign that person to the Martin Luther King, Jr., chair.”
Andrews holds a master of divinity degree from the Princeton Theological Seminary and a doctorate from Vanderbilt University. He has conducted research in historical studies on Methodism and preaching in the early church as a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University and is the author of Practical Theology for Black Churches: Bridging Black Theology and African American Folk Religion and the coauthor of Listening to Listeners: Homiletical Case Studies.
He was drawn to BU, he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, by “the prospect of teaching in a major metropolitan university featuring a highly diverse student body, thereby creating a more eclectic classroom encounter crossing social, cultural, and theological perspectives in a greater exchange of ideas and beliefs.”