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WORK TITLE: The Seminarian
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://patrickparr.com/
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COUNTRY: United States
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Currently he lives with his wife somewhere around the Pacific Rim.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Catawba College and Seton Hill University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and historian. New Jersey Historical Commission, historical consultant; has lectured at universities. Artist Trust Fellow, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals and periodicals, including the Humanist, the Atlantic, Seattle Magazine, and the Japan Times.
SIDELIGHTS
Patrick Parr is an American writer and historian. He grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, and earned degrees from Catawba College and Seton Hill University. Parr went on to lecture on a topics ranging from language to history to university students across thirty different countries. He has also served as an historical consultant for the New Jersey Historical Commission while working with Martin Luther King Jr. landmarks. Parr has contributed to a number of journals and periodicals, including the Humanist, the Atlantic, Seattle Magazine, and the Japan Times. He served as an Artist Trust Fellow in 2014.
Parr published The Seminarian: Martin Luther King, Jr. Comes of Age in 2018. The account centers on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s three years of seminary education at Chester, Pennsylvania’s Crozer Theological Seminary. Parr argues that it was during his years in seminary studies that King learned to speak eloquently and passionately. Parr divides the book into sections that follow each year of King’s studies, including the subjects he took, the teachers he studied with, and many of the books that he had read during this time. The book also links King to specific scholars who likely influenced his views and fellow students who he was close to. Parr looks into King’s forays into marriage with Betty Moitz that gave him certain insights into black-white relationships in the northern states.
Booklist contributor Ray Olson observed that “Parr writes appreciatively and even informally about his subject and drops a few gossipy tidbits.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found the book to be “a clear-eyed and honest account of some transformative experiences in the life of the gifted young man who would become a cultural icon.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly said that “Parr highlights this short, influential period in King’s life, fleshing out the details of courses, teachers, mentors, pals, and dates.” The Publishers Weekly reviewer called Parr’s representation of King “fresh.”
Reviewing the book in Washington Post Book World Online, Mark Whitaker remarked: “Presumably, readers will come to a book called The Seminarian expecting to discover how three years in divinity school influenced King’s religious and political ideas. On this score, Parr offers course catalog descriptions and some vivid stories, but not much in-depth reflection.” Whitaker pointed out that “apart from a paragraph about pool room bull sessions with the professor who introduced King to Reinhold Niebuhr, Parr gives little sense of how shaken and influenced King was by reading the “realist” theologian in his last year at Crozer.” Whitaker reasoned that “Parr offers little analysis, but he does leave readers with a memorable image.” Writing in the Christian Century, Heath W. Carter observed that “Parr’s book does not mount an especially ambitious argument,” noticing that “not until the epilogue does Parr name his desire to “push back against the deification and offer as nuanced a view as possible” of King. But the intent is clear throughout the book.” Carter concluded that “it is impossible to say at this point whether Parr’s study, along with the others being published on the half-century anniversary of King’s death, will succeed in correcting popular memory. But, swimming as we are in a sea of mis-remembrances, we can certainly hope.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2018, Ray Olson, review of The Seminarian: Martin Luther King, Jr. Comes of Age, p. 3.
Christian Century, April 3, 2018, Heath W. Carter, review of The Seminarian.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2018, review of The Seminarian.
Publishers Weekly, February 12, 2018, review of The Seminarian, p. 71.
Washington Post Book World, April 13, 2018, Mark Whitaker, review of The Seminarian.
ONLINE
Humanist.com, https://thehumanist.com/ (June 2, 2018), author profile.
Patrick Parr website, http://patrickparr.com (June 2, 2018).
Patrick Parr has written about Dr. King for magazines and newspapers such as the Atlantic,Seattle Magazine, and the Japan Times. He worked as a historical consultant for the New Jersey Historical Commission, helping to decide on nominated Martin Luther King Jr. landmarks. In 2014, he was awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship.
Patrick Parr writes for The Humanist and The Japan Times, among other outlets. His biography about Martin Luther King Jr.’s young adult years will appear in early 2018. www.patrickparr.com
Patrick has lived in Leysin, Switzerland, Oita, Japan, but grew up mostly in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. During his university career, he has taught language, literature and history to thousands of students from over thirty different countries. Most recently he taught at the University of Southern California, and before that the University of Washington - Seattle. Currently he lives with his wife somewhere around the Pacific Rim.
Patrick's forthcoming book, titled The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, will be released in April 2018 by Chicago Review Press.
Patrick graduated with a degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Catawba College, and followed that up with a Master's degree from Seton Hill University.
In May 2014, Patrick was awarded an Artist Trust Fellowship for his literary career.
Patrick's work has appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. His nonfiction has focused mainly on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He has also written extensively about Japan as well as various biographical portraits of historical figures such as James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut and Kato Shidzue (a Japanese feminist).
In the past, Patrick has been a tennis teaching professional, a newspaper delivery boy, and a sad version of Santa Claus. And although the television show has long concluded, Patrick will defend the absolute greatness of Lost to anyone disappointed by the ending.
Patrick is represented by Jane Dystel, at the literary agency Dystel, Goderich and Bourret LLC.
For press and speaking inquiries related to The Seminarian, please contact Olivia Aguilar, at oaguilar@ipgbook.com or oaguilar@chicagoreviewpress.com
The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age
Ray Olson
Booklist. 114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p3.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.
By Patrick Parr.
Apr. 2018. 304p. illus. Lawrence Hill, $26.99 (9780915864126). 251.
Parr accounts more fully for Martin Luther King Jr.'s seminary education than has any complete biography of the civil rights icon. This is worth doing because King's three years at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania, are the period in which the smart, capable youngster became the charismatic, mission-driven man. Charting King's progress through each year's three terms and the punctuating summers spent assisting his famous-preacher father, Parr brings to life every professor, fellow student, and mentor who influenced King, usually becoming lifelong friends as they did. King's progress was steeply upward in his course work and social context, and he graduated as president as well as being at the top of the class of 1951. He had learned theology, of course, but also about black-white relations in the North, partly through considering marriage to white Betty Moitz. A journalist rather than an academic, Parr writes appreciatively and even informally about his subject and drops a few gossipy tidbits, including King's habitual plagiarism in his school papers and why his professors seldom noticed it.--Ray Olson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Olson, Ray. "The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 3. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537267969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=40e22536. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537267969
Parr, Patrick: THE SEMINARIAN
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Parr, Patrick THE SEMINARIAN Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 4, 1 ISBN: 978-0-915864-12-6
The experiences of and changes in Martin Luther King Jr. during his three years (1948-1951) at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Parr, a historian who has written about King in Seattle Magazine and elsewhere, debuts with a work that focuses sharply on a somewhat neglected period of the Nobel laureate's life (1929-1968), the period when he left home--and paternal expectations--in Atlanta, traveled north, and began discovering who he was and what he must do. The text, sturdily chronological, features some key biographical details: for each term, we see the class schedule of King (whom the author refers to as "ML" throughout--as did King's intimates); the course descriptions from the Crozer catalog; and detailed information about his professors and classmates. Quoting occasionally from the papers King wrote at Crozer, the author is fearless about recording and commenting on King's patent plagiarism; he was fond of writing extensive passages, sometimes almost verbatim from his sources, and neglecting quotation marks or any form of citation. Although Parr doesn't excuse King's academic deceit, he does note that King's professors never did anything about it. The author also explores King's personal life during these years: his friends, his leisure activities (including pool and basketball--good at the former, not the latter), and his love life, including a rather extensive relationship with the white daughter of Crozer's cook, a relationship that worried friends and others. The late 1940s and early 1950s, even in the North, were not especially tolerant of interracial dating. Parr concludes with King's admission to the doctorate program at Boston University and finishes with some updates on key characters and on Crozer itself, now merged elsewhere, its campus closed.
A cleareyed and honest account of some transformative experiences in the life of the gifted young man who would become a cultural icon.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Parr, Patrick: THE SEMINARIAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461562/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c4e3cbd0. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461562
The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age
Publishers Weekly. 265.7 (Feb. 12, 2018): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age
Patrick Parr. Lawrence Hill, $26.99 (304p)
ISBN 978-0-915864-12-6
Historian Parr's debut work of nonfiction is a true life bildungsroman, in which the protagonist, a young man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr., grows up to be a world famous theologian and preacher. The book looks specifically at a formative yet largely overlooked period in King's life, beginning in 1948, when the then 19-yearold left his home in Atlanta, Ga., and headed north to attend divinity school at the Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa. Parr provides an in-depth account of the curriculum, which included introductory courses on the history and literature of the New Testament, practical and technical courses such as one on how to conduct a sermon over the radio, and more radical courses like Christianity and Study, in which King studied Walter Rauschenbusch's social gospel, which he often echoed later in his career when preaching to white audiences. Parr enriches the discussion of King's formal studies with insights into King's relationships with professors and fellow seminarians, and even discusses King's shortcomings as a student (Parr notes, for example, that King's poor grasp of citation rules would not fly today). Often overlooked or relegated to mere footnotes in previous biographies, Parr highlights this short, influential period in King's life, fleshing out the details of courses, teachers, mentors, pals, and dates, and presenting a fresh portrait of King, the "rookie preacher." Photos. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age." Publishers Weekly, 12 Feb. 2018, p. 71. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528615538/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6bcbbfc7. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528615538
Three years that turned Martin Luther King Jr. from student to preacher
By Mark Whitaker April 13
Mark Whitaker is the author of "Smoketown: The Unknown Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance." Previously, he was managing editor of CNN and, before that, editor of Newsweek.
Mark Whitaker is the author of “Smoketown: The Unknown Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.”
In the summer of 1947, at the age of 18, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to join the family business and become a preacher. After spending three years at Morehouse College socializing more than he studied and flirting with becoming a lawyer, he delivered the news to his father, the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Overjoyed, “Daddy” King had his son ordained and installed him as assistant pastor. At that point, young Martin could have stayed in Atlanta and settled into the comfortable life of a minister destined to inherit his father’s pulpit. Instead, he broke more news to his parents during his senior year: He planned to go to a seminary to pursue a bachelor of divinity degree. And not just any seminary: one up North, with a liberal, all-white faculty that prided itself on demythologizing the biblical figures of Moses and Jesus and introducing students to critical thinkers from Saint Augustine to Kant.
[When D.C. burned in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination]
King’s three years at the Crozer Theological Seminary, south of Philadelphia, marked an important turning point in his life and are well worth the exclusive focus they get in this compact, readable and well-researched book. A teacher and freelance journalist with a long-time interest in King, Patrick Parr has mined the papers at the King Center in Atlanta and at Stanford University, as well as archived interviews conducted by Taylor Branch and David Garrow, the authors of the best-known books about King, which devote relatively few pages to the Crozer story. Parr tracked down several classmates of King’s, who shared personal memories and took him on a tour of what’s left of the campus, which was closed in 1970. Tantalizingly, he also interviewed a white woman with whom King became briefly involved while at Crozer: Betty Moitz, then the 20-year-old daughter of the seminary cook.
Parr’s most interesting revelations trace King’s growth as a preacher and public speaker. Before he arrived at Crozer, his models in that area were his forceful but unpolished father, a smoother rival from another Atlanta church and the distinguished president of Morehouse, Benjamin Mays. At Crozer, King studied preaching every semester with Professor Robert Keighton, a lover of English literature who introduced him to classic sermon forms (with names like “three-points-and-a-poem” and “jewel,” in which a theme is examined from every angle), as well as to orating for the radio. But King also received feedback from the Rev. J. Pius Barbour, an African American pastor at a nearby church who invited black seminary students to his house for home-cooked meals and tough-love critiques, urging them not to lose touch with the call-and-response tradition of their churches while absorbing “the White Man’s intellectualism.” By the end of his first year at Crozer, King was giving guest sermons at nearby churches and was acknowledged as the finest preacher among his peers, a reputation that later won him election as class president.
“The Seminarian,” by Patrick Parr (Chicago Review)
The “love story” with Betty Moitz, teased throughout the book and in a foreword by Garrow, turns out to be tamer than advertised. From chats in the cafeteria, King’s friendship with the cook’s daughter, an interior-design student with brunette bangs, graduated to movie dates and kissing on the Crozer campus. But when King mused to Barbour and a fellow black student about the possibility of interracial marriage, they warned about the impact on his future standing in the black community. King immediately “cooled it,” as the classmate put it. And how serious King ever was about Moitz is unclear, since Parr mentions three black women he was courting around the same time. Reached by correspondence and then in one interview, Moitz, in her late 80s, described the relationship as two people “madly in love,” then simply as “short and sweet.” In the end, she concluded what most of King’s girlfriends did at the time: that his priority was his career and preparing himself to “return South to help.”
Presumably, readers will come to a book called “The Seminarian” expecting to discover how three years in divinity school influenced King’s religious and political ideas. On this score, Parr offers course catalog descriptions and some vivid stories, but not much in-depth reflection. He relates unpleasant episodes at local diners that stoked King’s anger at Northern racism. He identifies the experience that fired King’s interest in Mahatma Gandhi: when King went into Philadelphia to hear a speech by Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, the president of Howard University, who had just returned from a trip to India. Parr also documents several cases of King’s absorbing new thinkers by lifting their writing verbatim into his papers, a plagiarism habit that went unpunished at Crozer but later caused controversy over his Boston University doctoral dissertation. Yet apart from a paragraph about pool room bull sessions with the professor who introduced King to Reinhold Niebuhr, Parr gives little sense of how shaken and influenced King was by reading the “realist” theologian in his last year at Crozer.
[This black photographer befriended rights leaders and fed info on them to the FBI]
On the 50th anniversary of his assassination this month, a new HBO documentary and numerous commentaries have reminded us that King was no Pollyannaish integrationist but a fierce fighter for justice in all its forms, economic as well as legal. In his 1958 book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” King discussed how wrestling with Niebuhr’s pessimism about the limits of pacifism and the intransigence of collective evil forced him to rethink nonviolence as an instrument — not to change people’s hearts, but to confront and expose violently unjust institutions.
As King’s friend Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel later identified, King’s vision of himself as a “drum major for justice” also had much in common with the Old Testament prophets, whom he studied in depth at Crozer.
Here, too, Parr offers little analysis, but he does leave readers with a memorable image. As classmates passed King’s room in “Old Main,” the imposing central building on the Crozer campus, they often heard him rehearsing the delivery of the verse from the Book of Amos that he would invoke again and again over the next two decades, up to the impassioned “Mountaintop” speech he gave the night before his death. “Let justice run down like water,” King recited, “and righteousness like a mighty stream!”
The Seminarian
Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age
By Patrick Parr
Chicago Review Press. 286 pp. $26.99
The formation of Martin Luther King Jr.
Motivated in part by the whitewashing of a radical legacy, Patrick Parr explores King's seminary years and the roots planted there.
by Heath W. Carter April 3, 2018
In Review
The Seminarian
Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age
By Patrick Parr
Chicago Review Press
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Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the best known and least understood Americans of the 20th century. Fifty years after his assassination, the contrast between his life and memory could hardly be more stark. In the eyes of countless white Americans, King died a communist villain. He has been resurrected as a loveable mascot for an ever-improving American way.
On the January holiday that commemorates his life and legacy, we hear little about King’s strident opposition to racial and economic inequality at home, not to mention his vociferous denunciation of American imperialism abroad. Instead attention is directed to selective snippets from his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech and especially this line: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Ripped out of context, this one sentence might seem to suggest that King was a cheerleader for colorblind liberalism, seeking only formal, not actual, equality.
Heath W. Carter
Heath W. Carter teaches history at Valparaiso University in Indiana and is the coeditor, most recently, of Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans).
See All Articles
Apr 11, 2018 issue
But King was far more radical than that. He had democratic socialist sympathies and fought doggedly for a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The fact that his ties to the progressive labor movement have been scrubbed from the typical story is all the more amazing given that the reason he was in Memphis when gunned down there in April 1968 was to stand with striking sanitation workers.
Concern about such whitewashing is part of what motivated Patrick Parr to write The Seminarian. While another new book—Michael Honey’s To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice—focuses on the radical activism of King’s later years, Parr explores its deeper origins in his “formative time” at Crozer Theological Seminary. Drawing on a variety of sources, including interviews with some of King’s classmates, Parr captures the texture of this often-overlooked season, which stretched from 1948 to 1951, in Chester, Pennsylvania.
The story unfolds chronologically, as Parr chronicles each term of King’s seminary career. He was only 19 and full of boyish mischief when he arrived at Crozer, but by the time he graduated at 22 he was well on his way to being a formidable leader. Parr describes the full diversity of King’s experiences along the way, ranging from a stint on the Crozer basketball team to his tenure as class president his final year.
Many readers will be surprised to learn that King took advantage of the somewhat greater liberty afforded by his northern context and dated a white woman, Betty Moitz. The relationship would not last, but in Parr’s 2016 interview with Moitz, she related, “We were madly, madly in love, the way young people can fall in love.”
Most illuminating is the book’s treatment of King’s intellectual development. As others have shown, he was a serial plagiarizer of course papers. Parr offers extensive documentation of this problematic practice as well as some speculation about why King might have engaged in it, not to mention how he avoided getting caught (although the silence of the evidence on these latter questions makes it impossible to say anything definitive). What is beyond debate, as Parr underscores, is that the plagiarism makes it all the more challenging to trace the evolution of his thought in these years. Nevertheless, by retracing King’s curricular steps, Parr is able to recover an intellectual arc. He includes a chart of King’s classes for each term, complete with their catalog descriptions and his final grades, and describes some of his most influential teachers.
As a visiting student at the University of Pennsylvania, he read Kant, Marx, and Gandhi in a course with Professor Elizabeth Flower. Meanwhile, at Crozer he studied under the likes of Kenneth Smith and George W. Davis, who made sure he was steeped in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. The social gospel that King would propound in Montgomery, Chicago, and across the land was significantly honed during his time as a seminarian.
Parr’s book does not mount an especially ambitious argument. But he has done some impressive digging in the historical record and there is no doubt that scholars writing about King will find The Seminarian useful. The book should also attract students and faculty at seminaries and divinity schools, who will be interested not only in the particularities of King’s experience at Crozer but also in the fascinating picture that emerges of a mid-20th-century theological education.
Not until the epilogue does Parr name his desire to “push back against the deification and offer as nuanced a view as possible” of King. But the intent is clear throughout the book. Historians such as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall have argued persuasively that the mainstreaming of a revisionist, sentimentalized picture of King is one of the great victories of the latter-day opposition to the black freedom struggle. The more that Americans forget about King’s bracing egalitarianism, the more he becomes just another high priest in the nation’s civil religion, sanctifying a superficial fairness at the expense of true racial and economic justice.
It is impossible to say at this point whether Parr’s study, along with the others being published on the half-century anniversary of King’s death, will succeed in correcting popular memory. But, swimming as we are in a sea of mis-remembrances, we can certainly hope.