The Virginia Seminar
The Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology is a theological initiative that offers theologians and scholars of religion an opportunity to work and write in sustained engagement with critical issues in religion and public life; and it further provides practitioners the time to think and write in sustained and direct engagement with theologians and scholars.
The purpose of the Seminar is to provide research support for eight scholars and practitioners and opportunities for creative and fruitful exchange. The Seminar will produce single-authored volumes on theology and lived experience, modest in length and written in accessible prose for a broad reading audience.
The books produced in the Virginia Seminar will be distinguished not only by their theological interests, but also by their writing. Our aim is not to produce monographs that will be of use only to academics, but to support intellectually sophisticated yet accessible books. One of the distinctive features of the Virginia Seminar is that it will bring together scholars who have primarily written for an academic audience and those writers and scholars who have made their mark writing for more popular, general audiences. The Seminar will serve not only to give theologians, activists, and pastors time to write, it will help them craft lively, readable prose and to communicate their valuable ideas to the largest possible audience. (We will occasionally hold day-long seminars that cover such basics as finding an agent, querying trade publishers, and pitching articles, essays and reviews to magazines.) Because the heart of the Project focuses on the connections between theology and "real life," we are committed to helping Project participants get their written work into the "real world."
Meet past Virginia Seminar participants here.
Current Virginia Seminar participants are:
Valerie C. Cooper
Valerie C. Cooper is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She received her doctorate from Harvard Divinity School and both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Howard University. In her research and teaching, Dr. Cooper examines issues of religion, race, and society. Her book, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (The University of Virginia Press, 2011), analyzes the role of biblical interpretation in the work of Maria Stewart, a pioneering nineteenth-century African American woman political speaker. She and political scientist Corwin Smidt have just completed an essay on the role of religion and race for “Righteousness and Justice”: Religion, Barack Obama, and the 2008 Election, a text now under review by Columbia University Press.
In her current research, Dr. Cooper is evaluating the successes and failures of the reconciliation efforts of Christian congregations and ministries from the 1990s to the present. In addition to examining why such efforts frequently fall short of their stated goals, she also hopes to propose methods for achieving meaningful cross-racial relationships in America’s still very segregated churches and religious organizations. The product of this research will be a book, The Test of Power: Racial Reconciliation in the Church, which is to be published by Abingdon Press.
David Dark
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 received a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. A resident of Nashville, Tennessee, he attempts to raise children and live a life of mindfulness with singer/songwriter Sarah Masen.
Shannon Gayk
Shannon Gayk is associate professor of medieval literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. She is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Notre Dame, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2005. Her recent books explore the relationships among aesthetics, ethics, and theology in late-medieval England and include Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England (Cambridge UP, 2010) and an edited volume, Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century (Ohio State UP, 2011). She is currently completing several projects, including a book on pre-modern religious lyric, a study of the arma Christi (the instruments of Christ’s Passion) during the English reformations, and a co-edited collection of essays focusing on the changing place of sacred objects in medieval and early modern Europe.
Amy Laura Hall
Hall was named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 2004-2005 and has received funding from the Lilly Foundation, the Josiah Trent Memorial Foundation, the American Theological Library Association, the Child in Religion and Ethics Project, and the Pew Foundation. At Duke University, Professor Hall has served on the steering committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center and as a faculty member for the FOCUS program of the Institute on Genome Sciences and Policy. Hall served on the Bioethics Task Force of the United Methodist Church, and has spoken to academic and ecclesial groups across the U.S. and Europe. In 2009-2010, for example, she presented on social-Darwinism at the American Academy for the Advancement of the Sciences, served as a consultant to the World Council of Churches meeting on bioethics in Volos, Greece, presented keynote lectures at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and Point Loma Nazarene, and gave the Phillip Wogaman Lecture at Foundry UMC. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, Hall is a member of the Southwest Texas Annual Conference. She has served both urban and suburban parishes. She is the author of two books: Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love and Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction.
Russell Jeung
Russell Jeung is associate professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. He's the co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (New York University Press: 2012) and author of Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (Rutgers University Press: 2005). He's also the co-producer of the video documentary, The Oak Park Story, about his faith-based community organizing in East Oakland with Cambodians and Latinos. Along with his wife, Joan, he lives in Oakland, CA with their foster daughters, Bethsy and Bonny, and their son, Matthew. They attend New Hope Covenant Church.
John Kiess
John Kiess is assistant professor of theology at Loyola University Maryland. He completed his Ph.D. in Theology and Ethics at Duke University. 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. His doctoral dissertation explored the ethics of war 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, he is also interested in political theology, political theory, and philosophy, and is currently completing a book entitled Hannah Arendt and Theology (T&T Clark).
Samuel T. Lloyd
The Very Rev. Dr. Samuel T. Lloyd III was installed as the ninth dean of Washington National Cathedral on April 23, 2005, charged with leadership of what is widely referred to as "the national house of prayer" and is also the official seat of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. His ministry has focused on preaching, teaching, and developing Christian community, with emphases on lay leadership, wide-ranging styles of worship, and engagement in a broad array of direct and social justice ministries, while promoting a generous-spirited, intellectually vibrant Christian faith. Lloyd previously served as rector of historic Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts, for 12 years. He also served as rector of the Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer in Chicago, Illinois; chaplain of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee; assistant to the rector and chaplain at St. Paul's Memorial Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, and as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. Lloyd holds a Master of Divinity degree from Virginia Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Virginia, an M.A. degree in English Literature from Georgetown University, and a B.A. from the University of Mississippi. He has received honorary Doctor of Divinity degrees from the University of the South and Virginia Theological Seminary. Lloyd currently serves as Priest-in-Charge at Trinity Church Boston.
Jennifer M. McBride
Jennifer M. McBride is Board of Regents Chair of Ethics and assistant professor of religion at Wartburg College, a college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Waverly, Iowa. She received her master's degree and Doctorate in Theology, Ethics, and Culture from the religious studies department at the University of Virginia and her bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After receiving her doctorate in 2008, McBride became a 2008/2009 postdoctoral fellow in the Initiative in Religious Practices and Practical Theology at Emory University. From 2009-2011, she remained at Emory’s Candler School of Theology as a visiting lecturer and as program director for the Certificate in Theological Studies at Metro State Prison for Women, a program sponsored by the Atlanta Theological Association and housed at Emory.
McBride serves on the Board of Directors of the International Bonhoeffer Society, English Language Section. She is co-editor of Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought (Fortress Press, 2010) and author of The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Central to McBride’s teaching and research is the interaction of scholars and practitioners, a methodology that will continue to be implemented in her Virginia Seminar project, tentatively entitled, Reducing Distance: Radical Discipleship through an Open Door. As a writing fellow, McBride spent the 2010/2011 academic year as a full time participant-observer at the Open Door Community, an intentionally interracial, residential Christian activist and worshipping community in Atlanta, Georgia, that has been engaged in mercy and justice work on behalf of the homeless and prison populations for thirty years.
Vanessa Ochs
Vanessa L. Ochs is the author of Inventing Jewish Ritual (JPS), winner of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award. Her other books include Sarah Laughed, The Jewish Dream Book (with Elizabeth Ochs), The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices (edited with Irwin Kula), Words on Fire: One Woman's Journey into the Sacred, and Safe and Sound. For her writing, she was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently writing a "biography" of the Passover Haggadah for Princeton University Press.
Dr. Ochs is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies Program at the University of Virginia where she teaches courses in Judaism, the anthropology of religion, and spiritual writing. She has been a visiting fellow at Newnham College of Cambridge University, the Frankel Institute of the University of Michigan, and a Distinguished NEH Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Colgate University.
Ochs earned her B.A. in Drama and French from Tufts University, an M.F.A. in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College, and Ph.D. in Anthropology of Religion from Drew University.