The Northern California Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Foundation

ICS-2025 Europe

The NorcalMLK Foundation's ICS-Europe 2025 includes colloquia at three leading institutions, Regent's Park College - University of Oxford, King’s College London, and the Protestant Institute of Theology in Paris. Additionally, the series includes community gatherings at the historic New Road Baptist Church in Oxford, UK, and the American Cathedral in Paris.

Sponsors include:

See the ICS-2025 Europe sessions live and on-demand at NorcalMLK's Youtube channel.

The International Colloquium Series (ICS) is a bold initiative of the NorcalMLK Foundation’s King & Faith Series, sparking meaningful conversation between African American scholars and global religious thinkers.

Co-founded by the NorcalMLK Foundation executive director Dr. Aaron Grizzell, Ph.D., Dr. Dwight Hopkins, Ph.D., Ph.D., the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago, Dr. Raymond Carr, Ph.D., the president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and director of the Codex Charles H. Long Papers at Harvard University’s Moses Mesoamerican Archive, and Colette Rodgers-Grizzell, consulting advisor and strategist, ICS is rooted in the spirit of Dr. King—calling us not only to remember, but to interrogate and expand his legacy. Through gatherings on four continents, ICS creates powerful, localized moments of global reflection. This is where ideas cross borders, faith meets justice, and collaboration becomes a tool for transformation.

ICS is more than a lecture series—it’s a movement of ideas. Built on the foundational work of Dr. King and shaped by leading African American religious scholars, ICS creates a dynamic space for intercultural inquiry. Whether in Europe, Africa, Asia, or the Americas, ICS brings scholars together to confront pressing global issues with moral clarity and intellectual depth. These encounters spark new fields of research and foster connections across traditions, disciplines, and continents.

At the heart of the International Colloquium Series is a transformative vision: African American religious scholarship on the global stage as co-architect. ICS invites scholars into a vibrant and sustained engagement on religion, justice, and identity. These colloquia amplify the vital role of Black religious thought in addressing today’s most urgent questions—across culture, across faiths, across borders.

Through direct engagement between African American scholars and religious communities worldwide, ICS inspires deep dialogue and mutual understanding. This isn’t academic tourism—it’s grounded, contextual, and purpose-driven. ICS fosters fresh perspectives on faith, power, history, and the human condition, and offers a rare space for interdisciplinary exploration with lasting impact.

Finally, the International Colloquium Series is an invitation to serious global conversation on the sacred in public life—how religion informs resistance, resilience, and renewal. With thought leaders engaging across cultures and continents, ICS highlights the richness of African American religious insights while forging new paths of inquiry with global peers. Together, they illuminate the possibilities of shared wisdom in urgent times.

The religious experience, as a significant and acute human concern, provides a fruitful field for interdisciplinary exploration. Deep scholarly research and discussion in and about African American religious and theological expression furnishes rich and fertile ground for dialogical engagement.

Thus our goal for ICS is:

To foster greater intellectual stimulation and engagement between contemporary African American and global religious scholarship;
To encourage the broadening of interdisciplinary and intercultural exploration about religious expression and experience; and
To further the development of interdisciplinary and intercultural research among and between African American and global religious scholars.