Esau McCaulley, author portrait
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Esau McCaulley

Esau McCaulley is The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College. He is the author of numerous books, including How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South, Reading While Black, and the children’s books Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit and Andy Johnson and the March for Justice. A contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, his writings have also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Christianity Today.
How Far to the Promised Land

Books

How Far to the Promised Land

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 340 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this

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2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Esau McCaulley’s How Far to the Promised Land

After his father’s death, Esau McCaulley went back through his family history, seeking to understand the community that shaped him: someone who, through hard work, faith, and determination, overcame childhood poverty, anti-Black racism, and an absent father to earn a job as a university professor and a life in the middle class. With profound honesty

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