This Sunday: John M. Perkins speaks on the topic “Has the Dream Become a Nightmare? Prospects for Reconciliation in the Wake of the New Racism”

2015 Capps Lecture John M. Perkins

What does it look like to live a life of racial reconciliation? In an age of police brutality, mass incarceration, and even conflict on Grounds, we are searching for a means of healing. This Sunday as John M. Perkins reflects on the topic “Has the Dream Become a Nightmare? Prospects for Reconciliation in the Wake of the New Racism.” Perkins brings his life experience to explore the idea of New Racism and to consider how people of faith might respond.

The lecture is this Sunday, November 1st, at 4pm in Nau Hall 101, and is co-sponsored by U.Va.’s Project on Lived Theology and Theological Horizons. The event is free and open to the public. Seating is first-come, first-served, and space is limited.

The lecture will be video recorded and posted under PLT Resources and on the new Theological Horizons website.

There will be a reception following the lecture. All are welcome.

Dr. John M. Perkins was born and raised in poverty as a sharecropper’s son in Mississippi. He fled to California after witnessing the death of his brother at the hands of a town Marshall. Though he’d vowed never to return, Perkins went back to Mississippi in 1960 to share the Gospel and work for equality, justice and economic development. His outspoken leadership on civil rights brought harassment, imprisonment and beatings.

Today, John M. Perkins is internationally known on issues of racial reconciliation, leadership and community development. Dr. Perkins and his wife, Mrs. Vera Mae Perkins, founded Voice of Calvary Ministries and the Christian Community Development Association.

Perkins’s books include Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community, co-authored with UVa professor and PLT Director Charles Marsh, A Quiet Revolution, and Let Justice Roll Down.

Theological Horizons supports both Christians and seekers by advancing theological scholarship and by providing a welcoming home for engaging faith, thought and life.

For more PLT event details and up-to-date event listings please click here to visit the events page. We also post updates online using #PLTevents. To get these updates, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LivedTheology.

 

On the Lived Theology Reading List: James E. Atwood and America and Its Guns: A Theological Exposé – a wake-up call for the American faith community

James Atwood- America and its Guns: A Theological Expose

This week on the Lived Theology Reading List, we offer a review of James E. Atwood’s America and Its Guns: A Theological Exposé published in 2012 by Cascade Books. Atwood documents how Americans have been deceived into believing that the tools of violence, whether they take the form of advanced military technology or a handgun in the bedside stand, will provide security. He closes with a wake-up call to the faith community, which he says is America’s best hope to unmask the extremism of the Gun Empire.

In his review of America and Its Guns, Project Contributor Kristopher Norris states:

Atwood confesses that during his early years of activism, he misplaced his hopes and energies in the power of national and state legislatures to regulate guns while still respecting gun rights. Laws will not change, he believes, until people of faith realize how the “Gun Empire” has convinced America that only violence will achieve our security. Recognizing the inability of the political powers to adequately address the problem, he realized that gun violence was as much a spiritual issue as a political one. Understanding gun violence as a spiritual issue allows us to see that our trust in guns is nothing less than idolatry, he confesses. “Instruments which bring only death [are] incapable of providing peace” (204).

For more information on Atwood’s book, click here. To continue reading Norris’s review, click here. For access to this and other book reviews like this one, click here.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads.

 

On the Lived Theology Reading List: Soong-Chan Rah and Prophetic Lament – The Necessary Corrective to Christianity’s Future

rr Soong-Chan Rah Prophetic LamentSoong-Chan Rah’s latest publication, Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, has just been released. Rah writes in response to the American church’s tendency to avoid lament. But lament is a missing, essential component of Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be. Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices. Soong-Chan Rah’s prophetic exposition of the book of Lamentations provides a biblical and theological lens for examining the church’s relationship with a suffering world.

In his review of Prophetic Lament, Project Contributor Kristopher Norris states:

Prophetic Lament suggests lament as a counter to both the triumphalistic and nihilistic narratives that pervade the American evangelical church. Rah suggests the need for a new language and skills to lament the complex social and racial issues that face American society—and the church—today, beginning with the ability to confront our own culpability in these corporate sins and failures. Rah offers not only a thorough interpretation of the often-overlooked Book of Lamentations, but draws on this text to call the American evangelical church to lament its own history of racism and sexism. As Rah concludes, “Lamentations provides a necessary corrective to the triumphalism and exceptionalism of the American evangelical church arising from an ignorance of a tainted history” (198).

For more information on Rah’s book, click here. To continue reading Norris’s review, click here.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads.

PLT internship impact: Melina Rapazzini in Oakland, CA

Melina RapazziniPLT intern Melina Rapazzini spent her summer working at New Hope Covenant Church in Oakland, California. Melina led the church’s day camp program for four weeks, leading other interns in serving 20 low-income children from the neighborhood. We asked her site mentor, Russell Jeung, to share some reflections on Melina’s work this summer. This is what he said:

New Hope Covenant Church and I were so grateful to have Melina Rapazzini lead our local summer day camp this year! I have to share one story that stretched Melina’s faith and that proved her mettle. While leading an environmental tour of a local lake, one new, hyper camper got lost. For over half an hour, Melina ran two miles back around the lake, asking everyone if they had seen the boy. Finally, he was found. When we returned the child to his mother, Melina serenely and sweetly informed her, “We had a little incident…” My image of the Father of the Prodigal Son has now become that of Melina chasing a bratty eight year old around the lake. Both he and Melina have a desperate love to find the lost.

To hear stories from Melina about her time at New Hope, and to hear from our other interns, Caitlin Montgomery and Rachel Prestipino, come to our internship final event on Wednesday, October 21. Learn more here.

For more event details and up-to-date event listings please click here to visit the PLT events page. We also post updates online using #PLTevents. To get these updates, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LivedTheology.

 

Acclaimed civil rights leader John M. Perkins to deliver Capps Lecture

webready 2015 Capps Lecture posterOn Sunday, November 1, John M. Perkins will present the 2015 Capps Lecture, entitled “Has the Dream Become a Nightmare? Prospects For Reconciliation in the Wake of the New Racism.” The lecture will begin at 4:00 p.m. in Nau Hall 101 at the University of Virginia with a reception in Manley Commons to follow. Admission is free, and the public is invited to attend. Seating is first come, first served.

John M. Perkins was a civil rights leader in Mississippi in the 1960s and founded Voice of Calvary Ministries, a Christian community development ministry, with his wife Vera Mae. In 1983, Perkins established the John M. Perkins Foundation for Reconciliation & Development, Inc., to advance the principles of Christian community development and racial reconciliation throughout the world. His publications include Let Justice Roll Down (2012) and Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community (2010).

To be connected to the Facebook event, click hereCapps Lectures in Christian Theology is a program of Theological Horizons and this event is co-sponsored by the Project on Lived Theology.

For more event details and up-to-date event listings please click here to visit the PLT Events page. We also post updates online using #PLTevents. To get these and other news updates, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LivedTheology.

 

Upcoming Event: Eugene McCarraher to present on “Reinhold Niebuhr as Christian Critic: Public Theology and the American Century” next week

McCarraher Poster webcopy Oct 13 2013On Tuesday, October 13, Project Contributor Eugene McCarraher will lead a seminar, entitled “Reinhold Niebuhr as Christian Critic: Public Theology and the American Century.” The lecture will take place from 3:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in Nau Hall 241 at the University of Virginia. Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.

Eugene McCarraher is associate professor of humanities and history and the associate director of the honors program at Villanova University, and a former Charles Ryskamp Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2005-2006). He has written for Books and Culture, Commonweal, Dissent, In These Times, The Nation, the Chicago Tribune, The Hedgehog Review, and Raritan. McCarraher’s most recent project is The Enchantments of Mammon: Capitalism as the Religion of Modernity, a historical and theological reflection on the development of capitalism, and he is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (2000).

To be connected to the Facebook event, click here.
On our recommended reading list: Eugene McCarraher’s book Christian Critics, for more information click here.

For more event details and up-to-date event listings please click here to visit the PLT Events page. We also post updates online using #PLTevents. To get these and other news updates, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LivedTheology.

 

Charles Marsh to give 14th annual Prophetic Voices Lecture at Boston College

BonhoefferWhat happened to Bonhoeffer while he was in America?

On Thursday, October 8, 2015, Charles Marsh will deliver the 14th Annual Prophetic Voices Lecture, entitled “Bonhoeffer’s Transformative Encounters with the American Prophetic Tradition.” The event will be held from 5:30 p.m to 7:00 p.m. in Higgins 300 at Boston College. Marsh will be available to sign copies of his book, Strange Glory. This presentation is sponsored by Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

From Marsh’s lecture abstract:

In the America of the 1930s, among a nearly forgotten but venerable generation of religious radicals, social gospel reformers, and African American prophets, among the shapers of the labor movement, the heroes of the old reformist Left, and among the women and men who plowed the soil for the civil rights movement to come, Bonhoeffer reexamined every aspect of his vocation as pastor and theologian, and he embarked upon what he would call “the turning from the phraseological to the real.” His “journey to reality” is the plot that frames my lecture.

The Boisi Center will live-tweet the event. Join the conversation at #PropheticVoices. To connect to Boston College’s event page, click here. For more information on Charles Marsh and his recent lectures and publications, click here.

For information on other Project fall events, click here. For news and updates find us on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology.