Uncommon Ground: Living with Humility, Patience, and Tolerance in a Divided Age (Duke Divinity School)

Duke Divinity School is sponsoring a two-day webinar, Uncommon Ground: Living with Humility, Patience, and Tolerance in a Divided Age, as part of the 2021 Convocation and Pastors’ School. Our primary 2021 Convocation & Pastors’ School gathering will take place on October 4 and 5 from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. These sessions will center around panel discussions, with each session spotlighting one of our featured speakers: Bishop Claude Alexander, Dr. John Inazu, Sara Groves and Dr. Warren Kinghorn. We will highlight practitioners who, in a broken world marked by division, have found creative ways to work across “uncommon ground” to build up communities and relationships.

Dr. John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment seminars. His scholarship focuses on the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion, and related questions of legal and political theory. He is the author of Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012) and Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Tim Keller) of Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Thomas Nelson, 2020).

Inazu holds a B.S.E. and J.D. from Duke University and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He clerked for Judge Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and served for four years as an associate general counsel with the Department of the Air Force at the Pentagon.

Bishop Claude Alexander is the senior pastor of The Park Church in Charlotte, N.C. and second-presiding bishop of the Kingdom Association of Covenant Pastors. Under his leadership, The Park Church has grown from one local congregation of 600 members to a global ministry of thousands with three locations and weekly international reach. Currently, Bishop Alexander serves on the boards of Charlotte Center City Partners, Christianity Today, Mission America Coalition, Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and Movement.Org. He is the chair of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Board of Trustees. Since May of 1981, Bishop Claude Alexander has sought to serve God and community. Having accepted the call to ministry at the age of 17, he endeavored to prepare himself by obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Morehouse College (1985), a Master of Divinity degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (1988), and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (2004).

Sara Groves is a veteran singer-songwriter and recording artist with a passion for justice. Since 2005 she has been an artist advocate with International Justice Mission, a global organization that works to protect the poor from violence. At home in Minnesota, Groves and her husband Troy run a unique community art center, Art House North, out of a 110-year-old church where she has recorded her last two of 15 albums: “Abide With Me”, a collection of hymns, and “Joy of Every Longing Heart” (Christmas).

Dr. Warren Kinghorn is the Esther Colliflower Associate Research Professor of Pastoral and Moral Theology; Co-Director, Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative; and associate professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center. Dr. Kinghorn is a psychiatrist whose work centers on the role of religious communities in caring for persons with mental health problems and on ways in which Christians engage practices of modern health care. Jointly appointed within Duke Divinity School and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Duke University Medical Center, he is co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and is a staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. He has written on the moral and theological dimensions of combat trauma and moral injury, on the moral and political context of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the way that St. Thomas Aquinas’ image of the human as wayfarer might inform contemporary practices of ministry and mental health care. 

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