Showing results by author "Lerita Coleman Brown" in All Categories

Known as the godfather of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman served as a spiritual adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders and activists in the 1960s. Thurman championed silence, contemplation, common unity, and nonviolence as powerful dimensions of social change. But Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown didn't learn about him during her years of spiritual-direction training. Only when a friend heard of her longing to encounter the work of Black contemplatives did she finally learn about Thurman, his mystical spirituality, and his liberating ethic.

When Lerita Coleman, a 41-year-old single African-American psychology professor, learns she has only 18 months to live without a heart transplant, anxiety overwhelmed her. The daunting challenge of medical procedures, medications, and the unknowns of losing an organ that symbolized her core being haunted her. In desperation, she turned to her diseased heart for guidance about whether to live or die. What emerges are a series of remarkably wise and witty conversations with her old heart and the one she ultimately received during a transplant in 1995.