Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2011
Lived Theology in Method, Style and Pedagogy
May 25-26, 2011
Charlottesville, VA
The 2011 Spring Institute for Lived Theology: “Lived Theology in Method, Style and Pedagogy” was framed by two recent contributions to theological ethnography and the ethnographic study of religion: Manuel Vasquez’s More than Belief: A Materialist View of Religion and Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church. A small group of theologians, religion scholars, and practitioners brought working papers and convened to talk specifically about lived theology as method, style and pedagogy.
View more photos of the 2011 Spring Institute for Lived Theology
Schedule:
- Session I (May 25) : A Journey without Maps: Does Lived Theology need a Method? - Charles Marsh, University of Virginia
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session II (May 25) : More than Belief: A Material Theory of Religion- Manuel Vasquez, University of Florida
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session III (May 25) : "A Theology of Religious Pluralism:” Lived Theology & Civic Wholeness - Sarah Azaransky, University of San Diego
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session IV (May 25) : Thinking about Lived Theology from the Context of the Congo - John Kiess, Loyola University, Baltimore
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session V (May 26) : Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church - Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Duke Divinity School
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session VI (May 26) : Lived Theology and the Ethnographic Sensibility in Historical Scholarship - Matt Hedstrom, University of Virginia
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session VII (May 26) : Lived Theology 101:
Exploring the Claim "What We Believe Matters with Undergraduates" - Lori Brandt Hale, Augsburg College
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session VIII (May 26) : Making Gravy as Lived Theology:
Constructive Theology and Grassroots Activism - Jenny McBride, Wartburg College
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
- Session IX (May 26) : Everyday Apocalypse: Writing Lived Theology - David Dark, Vanderbilt University
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
- Session X (May 26) : Social Problems as Scenes of Theological Creativity - Willis Jenkins, Yale Divinity School
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
Listen to the Q&A (MP3 file).
- Session XI (May 26) : Part of the Body: Reflections on Risks and Responsibilities in the Discipline of Lived Theology - Peter Slade, Ashland University
Listen to the session (MP3 file).
2011 Spring Institute for Lived Theology speakers:
Sarah Azaransky teaches at the University of San Diego, where her teaching and research focus on religion in public life, particularly around issues of citizenship, social justice, and civil rights. She is author of The Dream is Freedom: Pauli Murray and American Democratic Faith and is editing a collection about doing theology in the borderlands. She serves on the board of directors of the Foundation for Change, a grassroots organization that builds social justice networks in immigrant and border communities in San Diego/Tijuana. She is an avid runner and loves the ocean.
David Dark is the author of The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons and Other Pop Culture Icons and The Gospel According To America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea, which was included in Publishers’ Weekly’s top religious books of 2005. He also contributed a chapter to the book Radiohead and Philosophy: Fitter Happier More Deductive (Chicago: Open Court, 2009). Following years of teaching high school English, Dark recently defended his dissertation, Insert Soul Here: The Witness of Sacramental Poetics as Apocalyptic for the People, at Vanderbilt University. A resident of Nashville, Tennessee, he attempts to raise children and live a life of mindfulness with singer/songwriter Sarah Masen.
An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Mary McClintock Fulkerson is Professor of Theology at Duke University Divinity School. She also teaches in the Duke Women’s Studies Program. Her first book, Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology, examined the liberating practices of non-feminist church women and feminist academics through the lens of poststructuralism and Marxist/feminist literary criticism. Her recent book, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church, explores the practices of an interracial church (United Methodist) that includes people with disabilities. This project offers a theory of practices and place that foregrounds the affective reactions and communications that shape all groups, particularly around perceptions of “otherness.”
Lori Brandt Hale is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of General Education at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN, which is an institution that values intentional diversity, citizenship, and the theological exploration of vocation. She currently leads the Augsburg partnership with Advancement via Individual Determination (AVID), an academic skills and support program that aims not only to close achievement gaps, but to prepare all students for success in college and for responsible participation and leadership in the world. Hale serves on the steering committee for the Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theology and Social Analysis Group of the American Academy of Religion, serves as the Secretary for the International Bonhoeffer Society (English Language Section), and is the co-author of Dietrich Bonhoeffer for Armchair Theologians (Westminster John Knox, 2009).
Matthew S. Hedstrom is a cultural historian of the United States, with particular interests in the history and culture of religions, both official and popular, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Virginia. Prior to coming to U.Va., he held postdoctoral positions at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University and in the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University. His main areas of teaching and research are religious liberalism, the cultures and politics of pluralism, religion and race, and print culture. His first book, Seeking a Spiritual Center: Books, Book Culture, and Liberal Religion in Modern America (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) explores the role of consumer culture, religious liberalism, and print media in the rise of spiritual cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century. He is beginning work on a new book project on race and the search for religious authenticity from the Civil War through the 1960s.
Willis Jenkins is the Margaret Farley Assistant Professor of Social Ethics at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford, 2008), which won a Templeton Prize for Theological Promise. He is co-editor, with Jennifer McBride, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, and editor of The Spirit of Sustainability. He is currently at work on a book on sustainability, social justice, and Christian ethics.
John Kiess will begin his appointment as Assistant Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland this fall. He completed his Ph.D. in Theology and Ethics from Duke University in May 2011. As a George J. Mitchell Scholar, he earned his M.A. in Comparative Ethnic Conflict at Queen’s University Belfast and M.Phil in Theology from Cambridge University. Kiess has been actively involved in peacemaking initiatives in the Great Lakes Region of Africa under the auspices of Duke Divinity School’s Center for Reconciliation. His doctoral research focuses on the problem of war in Christian ethics through the lens of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he conducted fieldwork in 2008-2009. In addition to his work on conflict and peacemaking, Kiess is also interested in political theology, political theory, and philosophy, and is currently working on a book entitled Hannah Arendt and Theology (T&T Clark).
Jennifer M. McBride begins her appointment as the Board of Regents Chair in Ethics and Assistant Professor of Religion at Wartburg College in Fall 2011. After receiving a doctorate in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2008, Jenny became a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, where she has also served as director of a theology certificate program for incarcerated women. She is co-editor of Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought and author of the forthcoming book, The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness.
Peter Slade teaches courses in the History of Christianity and Christian Thought at Ashland University in Ohio. After finishing his undergraduate degree in theology at St. Andrews Scotland, Slade worked for several years as a community development worker for the Church of England before moving to the States for (too much) graduate school. Interested in the lived ecclesiologies of Christian communities, his first book, Open Friendship in a Closed Society; Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship (OUP, 2009), is an interdisciplinary study of an ecumenical racial reconciliation initiative in Mississippi.
Manuel A. Vásquez teaches in the religion department at the University of Florida, Gainesville. His areas of expertise are religion in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos; religion and globalization, with a particular focus on immigration; and method and theory in the study of religion. He received his Ph.D. from Temple University in 1994 and was an Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Americas, Wesleyan University in 1998-2000. Vásquez is the author of More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford, 2011) and The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity(Cambridge, 1998), which received the award for excellence in the analytical-descriptive study of religion from the American Academy of Religion. He has also co-authored Living “Illegal”: The Human Face of Unauthorized Migration (forthcoming, New Press) and Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (Rutgers, 2003). In addition, he has published a number of co-edited volumes, including A Place to Be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s New Destinations (Rutgers, 2009), Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context (NYU, 2008), and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (AltaMira, 2005). Currently, Vásquez has a grant from the Ford Foundation (with Philip Williams) to lay the foundations of an institute for the study of religion, immigration, and social change in the American South. He is also a member of the planning committee for "The Religious Lives of Migrant Minorities," a project based at the Social Science Research Council which includes field research among Christians, Muslims, and Hindus in London, Johannesburg, and Kuala Lumpur.