Ideas Festival Emory

Will D Campbell was one of the most important southern white religious figures of the Civil Rights Era. He escorted black students during the Little Rock integration and was present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In an era when other Southern Baptists were strongly opposing Civil Rights, Campbell supported Freedom Riders and addressed issues like desegregation and the assassination of Medgar Evers.
Campbell's theology emphasized concern for all souls, including bigots, which sometimes put him at odds with other activists. He protested the Vietnam War, opposed the death penalty and abortion, and distrusted government. He authored numerous works, including "Race and the Renewal of the Church," "The Glad River," and "The Stem of Jesse." His autobiography, "Brother to a Dragonfly," was a National Book Award finalist in 1978.
David Dark is an American writer, the author of We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other In Worlds That Demand Our Silence, Life's Too Short To Pretend You're Not Religious, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons and The Possibility of America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea, which was included in Publishers’ Weekly’s top religious books of 2005. He also contributed a chapter to the book Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (Chicago: Open Court, 2009). Following years of teaching high school English, he received his doctorate in 2011 and now teaches at the Tennessee Prison for Women, Charles Bass Correctional Facility, and Belmont University where he is associate professor of Religion and the Arts.