This year's C.S. Lewis Legacy Lecture will focus on the legacy of martyred German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Storyteller the Rev. Larry Brown, of Columbia, will deliver Westminster College's eighth annual lecture at 11 a.m. Feb. 6. in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury. Brown is famous for infiltrating and writing about racist, white nationalist groups throughout the United States. He frequently appears on PBS.
Bonhoeffer famously opposed Adolf Hitler and vehemently protested Nazi treatment of the Jews during World War II.
Brown's lecture will commemorate the 75th anniversary of Bonhoeffer's death: He was executed April 9, 1945, at Flossenburg, a Nazi concentration camp in Flossenburg, Germany.
Dr. Cliff Cain, the Harrod-C.S. Lewis professor of religious studies at Westminster, said the college is the perfect venue for Brown's lecture.
"Given the history of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, during the Nazi air raids on England, and especially London, it is quite appropriate that this year's lecture be held here," Cain said.
Brown is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister and a professor emeritus of human geography at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
The C.S. Lewis Legacy Lecture is a well-established event at Westminster that honors the legacy of British writer and thinker C.S. Lewis. Through the annual lecture, the college seeks to bring to campus people who speak to themes, topics and issues Lewis regarded highly.
Past lecture topics include faith and reason, theological imagination, science and religion, the contribution of Native American spirituality to Christian thought today, the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., misconceptions about Muslims and Islam, and antisemitism and Jewish-Christian relations after the Holocaust.
Founded in 1851, Westminster College is a private liberal arts college in Fulton. Located on the Westminster campus, the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, is part of America's National Churchill Museum, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. The Church and Museum commemorate Winston's Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, delivered on campus in 1946.