The James Luther Adams Foundation seeks to cultivate a community of inquiry, conversation, and action engaging the distinctive voice and vision of James Luther Adams with contemporary religious, political, economic, and cultural concerns—concerns that are personally and institutionally formed and reformed through prophetic faith, democratic community, and ecological commitment.
Newly Published Essay on Adams by George Kimmich Beach
“James Luther Adams has made it the project of a lifetime to reshape liberal religion.”

Read James Luther Adams and the Transformation of Liberal Religion by George Kimmich Beach, editor of three collections of Adams’s essays and a book on his theology.

Kairos/Conversations

The community of faith in which and from which we live finds its self-awareness in changing situations only through our speaking with each other.  Our community of faith is a community of communication.  It is a community of dialogue, or perhaps we should say, of multilogue.  Something very important for religious faith is implied by the very existence and possibility of communication.” 

~ James Luther Adams, “In the Beginning Is the Word” 

Where today do we turn to find probing discussion on matters of religious and ethical concern to our communities of faith? The late David B. Parke last carried this torch as Editor of the lively journal, Kairos (Greek, “the right time”). We seek to open such a space again for timely contributions by Authors, Respondents, and others wishing to comment.

In keeping with the virtually unlimited in range of Adams’s concerns, topics of these Kairos/Conversations may be as various as our own ultimate and proximate concerns. If those who take part gain new self-awareness and consensus, so much the more will JLA’s vision of a “community of communication” be sustained.

James Luther Adams headshot
James Luther Adams
William Everett
William Everett
Hak Joon Lee
Hak Joon Lee
Kim Beach headshot square
George Kimmich Beach
Norm Faramelli
Norman Faramelli
Jerome Ross
Jerome C. Ross
Rev. Nancy Ladd
Nancy McDonald Ladd

Kairos/Conversation One

Essay:
“The Prophetic Theology of James Luther Adams”
by George Kimmich Beach
Commentaries:
“Response to Beach on Adams’s Prophetic Theology”
by Norman Faramelli

Reply by Beach

“Is Such a ‘Prophetic Theology’ What We Need Today?”
by Rev. Dr. Jerome C. Ross

Reply by Beach

“By Their Groups You Still Know Them”
by Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd

Reply by Beach

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The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions — social, economic, and political — of the common life.”

James Luther Adams

WHAT'S NEW

Robert Kraig is on the Board of Directors of the JLA Foundation and is a grandson of James Luther Adams. He serves as the Executive Director, Citizen Action of Wisconsin. A recent article of Robert’s was featured in progressive news magazine In These Times. How Progressives Can Counter ‘Tough-on Crime’

William Everett, who was James Luther Adams’s teaching assistant in his final year at Harvard and is a member of the Board of James Luther Adams Foundation, now brings a number of his essays into a volume that lifts up the many strands of covenantal thought in his work. A

Newly Republished Edition: (San Diego: Reader’s Magnet Press, 2021, 381 pages) In this book Adams’s leading editor and interpreter provides a comprehensive synthesis of his thought. The book is organized around Adams’s major themes, giving theological context to the numerous anecdotes that made his rhetoric irresistible. This new edition is

Based on newly processed home movies by James Luther Adams, never shown before, of Germany’s most prominent Christian leaders of the 1930s. A film about the church and the Nazis. James Luther Adams, professor emeritus of Christian ethics, and George Huntston Williams, professor emeritus of church history, recount their personal remembrances

Who was James Luther Adams and why is he important for those who care about the fate of liberalism—liberal religion and liberal democracy alike—in this age of anxiety?  For an answer there is no better place to begin than Adams’s own dialogues at a gathering of the Collegium Association, at

“We Unitarian Universalists have been living off the intellectual capital of James Luther Adams for half a century now.” It was in the 1980s. The speaker was a respected older UU minister. His assertion surprised me at first, since he was a self-declared religious humanist, while JLA was clearly a

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