10/27/2026
Join us as we listen to our Pastor's Book Talk on The Christian Recorder
On this evening’s episode of TCR Dialogues Book Talk, we sit down with Rev. Dr. Aaron Treadwell, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church in Murfreesboro, TN and professor at Middle Tennessee State University, to talk about his book "Tongues of Fire: Black Preaching in the Face of Lynching." Drawing on the pages of The Christian Recorder, Dr. Treadwell uncovers how Black clergy and laypeople responded to lynching, restoring agency to a story too often told only through suffering. He explains why The Recorder, as the oldest continuous Black periodical, was one of the few spaces where a prophetic voice could speak without being censored.
Dr. Treadwell walks us through the book’s three groupings of sermons - the pious and respectable, the constitutional, and the radical - and explains how they worked together as a dialectic for liberation. The conversation also honors those who chose survival as a form of resistance and considers why sermons written more than a century ago still speak so pointedly to our moment.
Join us Live at 7pm (EST)
To purchase "Tongues of Fire: Black Preaching in the Face of Lynching" visit https://lsupress.org/9780807184905/tongues-of-fire/
To learn more about Dr. Treadwell and his work, visit his pages:
https://allenchapelboro.org/pastor
https://aarontreadwell.com/
