COMBINED ADULT SUNDAY SCHOOL: OCTOBER 2026

Dr. Mark Douglas, J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary, teaches a special class series entitled “When Red and Blue Don’t Make Purple: Faithful Responses to Political Division.”

The realities of political division in the United States not only confront us daily; they sometimes threaten to overwhelm us. If we are to respond to them, it helps not only to get a better sense of how they manifest themselves (including in the church) but also a deeper sense of the forces that have given rise to them. This class names some of those manifestations, explores the dynamics that have produced them, and suggests ways that persons of faith might move forward in ways that diminish the chaos of dysfunction and promote an ethic of neighbor love.

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Mark Douglas is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA, where he is the inaugural director of the seminary’s Center for Theology and Contested Publics. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Christian Pacifism for the Environmental Age (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Modernity, the Environment, and the Just War Tradition, (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He is currently working on a new book, War in a Warming World: Religion, Resources, and Refugees. He is married to the Rev. Dr. Lindsay Armstrong who is also a PCUSA minister and they have one daughter, Logan, who recently completed a PhD in museum studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland.