Continuing Education News

Jonathan Tran (Ph.D., Duke University), formerly George W. Baines Chair in Religion Department at Baylor University, is  now associate dean for faculty in Baylor’s Honors College, where he serves as associate professor of great texts. He is author of the award-winning Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2022) and serves as series co-editor of the Oxford University Press/American Academy of Religion series “Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion.”

Mai Khôi is a Vietnamese artist and activist who rose to stardom in 2010 after winning the Vietnam Television song and album of the year awards. Several years later she became increasingly uncomfortable having to submit her work to government censors and, thinking she could reform the system from within, nominated herself to run in the National Assembly elections on a pro-democracy platform. Her campaign sparked a nationwide debate about political participation and freedom of expression. Today, she leads efforts to promote freedom of artistic expression in Vietnam for which she was awarded the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. Her activism has, however, come at a high price. She has had her concerts raided, been evicted from her house, and has been detained and interrogated by the police. Since 2020, she has been an artist-in-residence at City of Asylum and was a 2020-2021 Artist Protection Fund Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Oct. 25, 2023

4:30 p.m. W. Don McClure Lecture - “The Plenteous Harvest: How Identity Politics is Killing the Church, and How Theology Might Save Us Yet”

This lecture offers an account of race and racism based on identity politics, offers an alternative account based on political economy, and relates the political economy of racial capitalism to a rival political economy, God’s “deep economy” incarnated in the local church's liberative politics. 

6:00 p.m. Dinner - Registration required. See below to register.

7:30 p.m. “Journeys on Purpose: Reflections Between Vietnam and America”

A conversation between Jonathan Tran and City of Asylum artist in residence/Vietnamese activist Mai Khôi

All  lectures are free and open to the public. Registration required to receive Zoom link.

Register to join us - in person or online - for the 2023 McClure Lecture!

Registration for dinner is closed.

The W. Don McClure Lectures in World Mission and Evangelism honor the Rev. Dr. W. Don McClure, a 1934 graduate of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, who served as a missionary in Africa for nearly 50 years. Born in Blairsville, Pa., Don McClure began teaching in Khartoum in 1928, upon graduating from Westminster College, Pa. After studying at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, he returned with is wife, Lyda, to Sudan to evangelize among the Shulla people.

In 1938, Don initiated a mission at Akobo, on the Sudan-Ethiopia border. The "Anuak Project" employed a team of specialists in education, agriculture, medicine, and evangelism, with the intenion of fostering a self-sustaining, self-governing Anuak Church within 15 years. So successful were they that, in 1950, the McClures opened a new work at Pokwo. Later, while serving as general secretary of the American (Presbyterian) Mission, Don was asked by Emperor Haile Selassie I to establish a similar project on the Somali border. For some years McClure worked as a mission representative to the Ethiopian government. He negotiated an agreement allowing Christian missionary doctors and nurses to supervise government medical programs, and he worked for better relations between Presbyterian Mission programs and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

McClure's years in African spanned dugout canoes to jet boats, in an arc through Sudan and Ethiopia equal to the distance between Pittsburgh and Dallas. After retirement, he continued as a volunteer at Gode, Ethiopia, until he was shot to death by guerrillas on March 27, 1977. Don McClure's life is told in  Adventure in Africa: From Khartoum to Addis Ababa in Five Decades  (1990), written by Charles B. Partee, P.C. Rossin Professor Emeritus of Church History at PTS.