Birmingham-Southern Announces Baccalaureate Speaker

For Immediate Release
May. 7, 2018

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Christian activist and author Shane Claiborne will speak at Birmingham-Southern College’s Baccalaureate service at 11 a.m. on Thursday, May 24 at Canterbury United Methodist Church.

Claiborne heads up Red Letter Christians, a group committed to living “as if Jesus meant the things he said.” He's been jailed for advocating for the homeless and has protested war in Iraq and Afghanistan. His books include “The Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical” and “Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us.” He is currently working on a volume about gun violence.

Claiborne, who grew up in east Tennessee, worked alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta. He graduated from Eastern University and in 1998 founded The Simple Way, an intentional community in Philadelphia. He has been a member of the Iraq Peace Team and is a board member for the Christian Community Development Association.

Claiborne has given academic lectures at Harvard University, Princeton University, Duke University, and elsewhere. His work has appeared in Esquire, Christianity Today, and the Wall Street Journal and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

He will be the featured speaker at BSC’s Baccalaureate, a special service of prayers and song that is part of the college’s Commencement Week tradition. The event celebrates the graduates and their families and ritualistically marks the closure of their college experience from a religious perspective. While rooted in BSC’s historical foundations in the Methodist tradition, it is inclusive and welcoming of other faiths.