Mother Emanuel: Faith and Forgiveness Ten Years After the Charleston Church Massacre

Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston — Mother Emanuel — before June 17, 2015, when a young white supremacist massacred nine Black worshippers at an evening Bible study. Although the shooter had targeted the first AME church in the South to agitate racial strife, he could not have anticipated the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted the South since the earliest days of European settlement.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Kevin Sack (Journalism) spent a decade researching and writing “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church,” which explores the remarkably rich 200-year history that brought the church to its lowest moment. During this lunch talk, he will discuss the newly published book in conversation with Judith Weisenfeld (Religion), chair of the Department of Religion and a scholar of African American religious history.

Presented by the Humanities Council’s Program in Journalism. Lunch talks are open to University faculty, students, and staff. Space is limited. RSVP required here.

*Please note, RSVP form requires University log-in credentials

Related reading:

Debbie Elliot, Andrew Craig, Samantha Balaban, NPR, “10 years after the deadly church shooting, a new history of ‘Mother Emanuel”

NYT Staff, The New York Times, “The 10 Best Books of 2025”