It is our conviction that the patterns and practices of religious communities offer rich and generative material for theological inquiry. These patterns and practices are not just ways of “doing things” (as the historian Wayne Meeks has written in one of his essential studies of early Christian communities), but they are also ways of “saying things”: practices and patterns are “communicative.” As theologians and scholars of religion, we further believe that, when properly interpreted, the lived experiences of faith are communicative not only of a religious community’s collective self-understanding but of modes of divine presence as well.

The Project further endeavors to demonstrate the importance of theological ideas in the public conversation about civic responsibility and social progress. Theology matters, now more than ever. It is our hope to provide analytical attention to religion’s role in shaping human behavior and to retrieve valuable resources from the Christian faith and its particular conceptions of God and the good—and more broadly from the shared beliefs and values of the Abrahamic tradition—that assist students, scholars and practitioners in the work of building just and compassionate communities.

See our full 20 minute documentary here.