Conversations
Author Events at First Baptist Church Decatur
Conversations at First Baptist Church Decatur has been pleased to partner with the Georgia Center for the Book and others in the Decatur community to host public dialogues in our community at the intersection of faith, purpose, and values.
Enjoy listening to some of our previous presentations for the first time or to revisit an event you attended by clicking on the links below.
“Engaging the minds and connecting the spirits of our community...”
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Upcoming Conversations
The inaugural Decatur Children’s Book Festival, presented by Little Shop of Stories, will feature authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, middle grade literature, and graphic novels. The keynote speaker, Kate DiCamillo, will give her address right here at FBCD on May 3 at 5:00 pm! Kate DiCamillo is the bestselling author of The Tale of Despereaux, Because of Winn-Dixie, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, the Mercy Watson series, and so many more beloved classics of children’s literature. To learn more, visit the Decatur Children’s Book Festival website, and be sure to follow them on social media.
Recent Conversations
TJ Klune with Kira Apple - In the Lives of Puppets
TJ Klune joined us in Decatur to celebrate the paperback release of his enchanting In the Lives of Puppets. It is a compassionate tale of the extraordinary journey of a family assembled from spare parts. In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots. Inspired by Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, and like Swiss Family Robinson meets Wall-E, In the Lives of Puppets is a masterful stand-alone fantasy adventure from the beloved author who brought you The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door.
YouTube:
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DxAaSSl1jWxZWuL3lok9j3sJ6roCHL3x/view?usp=sharing
Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman with Greg Bluestein - Find Me the Votes
Two years of immersive reporting by veteran award-winning investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman has produced the most authoritative and dramatic account yet of a defeated president’s conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and how a local Georgia prosecutor—a daughter of the civil rights movement—decided to indict him and his allies for his desperate attempt to hold on to power. With original reporting and exclusive access to thousands of secret documents, emails, text messages, and audio recordings, Find Me the Votes is investigative journalism at its finest. Michael Isikoff will be in conversation with Greg Bluestein, AJC journalist.
FBCD YouTube: https://youtu.be/rd3RYtyKODk?si=gYoFSreWEoIqJirK
FBCD Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/decaturchurch/videos/627570119496594/
Ayesha Rascoe with Dr. Beverly Tatum - HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience
In this joyous collection of essays, edited by the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Ayesha Rasco, alumni of historically Black colleges and universities write testimonials about the schools and experiences that shaped their lives and made them who they are today. For many, the choice to attend an HBCU was a careful commitment to be educated in a place where they would never have to justify their presence. Ayesha Rasco will be joined in conversation onstage with Spelman College President Emerita Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/xHjMLMP6oRc?si=jmC4KMQpajFwTOGR
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/decaturchurch/videos/1126083911896182/
Ijeoma Oluo with Oriaku Njoku - Be a Revolution
Author Ijeoma Oluo joins Oriaku Njoku onstage for a conversation about how people across America are working to create real positive change in our structures. Aiming to inspire action and change, Oluo takes our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action. Be A Revolution is both a chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/FVGP1qsPMbM
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/decaturchurch/videos/358976253653135/
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet: a stunning meditation on memory, family, and history that explores how we in America might—together—come to a new view of our shared past. In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Tracy K. Smith found herself soul-searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” With lyricism and urgency, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking—personal, documentary, and spiritual—to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.
To Free the Captives begins this journey by assembling a new terminology of American life. Parsing the difference between the Free and the Freed, and the distance between Time Ago and Soon, Smith etches a portrait of where we find ourselves four hundred years into the American experiment and offers a compelling argument for the vocabulary of the soul as a tool for fulfilling our duties to each other and to the future.
From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.
Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.
Facing Our Divisiveness: Understanding the Origins of Our Discontent
Conversations and Emory Center for Ethics, along with other community partners, welcome Ms. Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of the critically-acclaimed bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste.
Centering on current issues of social justice, Emory’s fourth annual James W. Fowler Ethics Event is focused on America’s continuing divisiveness and how we may bring hope for the future. Ms. Wilkerson’s clear identification of the power dynamics involved in maintaining social structures resonates deeply with us. We believe our community is hungry for understanding, and her focus on narratives and our own accountability will be a clarion call for change.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – author of The New York Times bestselling debut Friday Black – is back with an action-packed, visionary, and wholly unique new novel. Chain Gang All Stars centers on two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system (not so far-removed from America’s own).
Tayari Jones – A New York Times best-selling author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage published in 2018.
An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he’d never met—and how faith brought them all together. Blake covered some of the biggest stories about race in America for twenty-five years before realizing that “facts don’t change people, relationships do.” He only discovered that after experiencing what he calls “radical integration.” It was the only way forward for him and his family—and it’s the only way forward for America as a multiracial democracy. More Than I Imagined is a hopeful story for our difficult times.
