Three students perched on the desks, forming a semi-circle around the Rev. Amos Byron Coleman III. Time had expired on their Thursday afternoon class period, but a few students stayed after to continue the discussion.
They drew on Coleman’s lectures and their own experiences to grapple with the question Coleman posed to the group: Why was it so uncommon for white people to join majority black churches, but not so much the other way around?
Even this small portion of the class — a representative sample of the whole — was made up of students of different races, genders and religious backgrounds.