The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture 2024

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture will be delivered on Thursday, April 4, 2024 by Jonathan Eig, author of The New York Times bestseller King: A Life.

The in-person event will be hosted in the Seminary Chapel, and the lecture will be streamed live on YouTube.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture is sponsored by the President’s Office, the Association of Black Seminarians and the Betsey Stockton Center for Black Church Studies. The lecture was established to embrace the heritage of Martin Luther King, Jr. and “to engage Christian faith with intellectual, political and economic life in pursuit of truth, justice, compassion and peace.

About Jonathan Eig:

Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, four of them New York Times bestsellers. His most recent book, King: A Life, has been hailed as a "monumental…definitive" biography of Martin Luther King Jr. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and King was named one of the ten best books of the year by The Washington Post. Jonathan’s previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and was a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Jonathan's first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award. His fourth book, The Birth of the Pill, will be staged soon as a theatrical production by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago.

Jonathan is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School. He began his writing career at age 16, working for his hometown newspaper, The Rockland County (N.Y.) Journal News and went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He's since appeared on the Today Show, NPR's Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He served as a producer on the PBS documentary Muhammad Ali, which was directed by Ken Burns. But his greatest claim to fame, according to his parents, is that his name once appeared in a Jeopardy question (which was solved correctly for $200).