Le Chambon, the Holocaust, and the Lives of André and Magda Trocmé

During World War II, the southern French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding villages became a haven for Jews and others in flight from Nazi roundups, where they could regroup before being hidden or led abroad. This was in no small part due to André and Magda Trocmé, two individuals who made nonviolence a way of life. In A Portrait of Pacifists, author Richard Unsworth uses the Trocmés’ unpublished memoirs, interviews, and original research in order to detail the couple’s role in the history of pacifism before, during, and after the war.

The Trocmés’ courage during World War II has been well documented in books and film, yet the full arc of their lives—the impulse that led them to devote themselves to nonviolence and their extensive work in the decades following the war—had yet to be examined. Unsworth rectifies this by tracing their mission of building peace by nonviolence throughout Europe to Morocco, Algeria, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. Regardless of which nation was condoning violence, shaping international relations, or pressing for peace, both André and Magda remained driven by conscience to make nonviolence the hallmark of their life’s work.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“A compelling and engaging narrative that tasks any reader to think about the role and reality of violence within their world. More to the point, it tasks anyone interested in nonviolence to think about the Christian call to become peacemakers in the world as an uncompromising demand.”—Peace and Justice Studies Journal

“A beautifully written and long overdue biography of Magda and André Trocmé, two of the prime movers in a World War II rescue mission in south-central France that saved the lives of an estimated 3,500 refugees. Working with thousands of unpublished pages, Unsworth probes deeply into the psyche of these two very different internationalists from whose biographies emerge a history of nonviolence, conscientious objection and pacifism in the twentieth century.”—Patrick G. Henry, Whitman College

“An absolutely wonderful new biography of two seminal figures in the international history of nonviolence. Unsworth draws on rich archival research and personal interviews, skillfully weaving a narrative of these two exceptionally courageous and inspiring individuals. A comprehensive and engagingly written account, and a ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in nonviolence, the resistance to Nazism, and more broadly the meaning of a life uncompromisingly lived according to the highest ethical ideals.”—Micheal D. Bess, Vanderbilt University Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina

Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, author Claudia Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins in Stories of Struggle. These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians’ often violent resistance to change.

Brinson highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers’ strike. She also includes firsthand accounts from petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton’s Briggs v. Elliot ― a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision ― the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter, and many more participants who have never had their stories told.

This pioneering study details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured―as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress―and hope for the future.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Stories of Struggle is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the fight for racial justice in South Carolina. The riveting stories are horrifying in their depiction of what African American activists in the state endured, yet inspiring and uplifting in their description of what all these heroes accomplished. The book is a tremendous contribution to the history of South Carolina and the nation, and to the history of the civil rights movement.”―Marjorie J. Spruill, author of Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics

“In Stories of Struggle, Claudia Smith Brinson does an exceptional job in detailing in depth the full story of the significant role black South Carolinians played in the ultimate struggle that led to the U. S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that brought an end to racial segregation in public schools and ultimately the passage of 1964 Civil Right Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act that followed.”―Jack Bass, author of The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

“If you think nothing of significance involving civil rights happened in South Carolina read Stories of Struggle. If you think South Carolina lacked drama, cruelty, violence, and above all courage during the civil rights era read this book. If you are not familiar with James M. Hinton, Cecil Ivory, Mae Frances Moultrie, Rosetta Simmons, and many others, read this book. There are no statues of these men and women, but they are some of the toughest, bravest, and most resourceful people that South Carolina has ever produced.”―William C. Hine, author of South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

An Exploration in Community

Despite only being open for 23 years, Black Mountain College ranked among the most important artistic and intellectual communities of the twentieth century, with a legacy that lives on in the avant-garde colleges of today. In Black Mountain, author Martin Duberman uses interviews, anecdotes, and research to depict the relationships that made Black Mountain College what it was.

Black Mountain College had an eclectic group of faculty and alumni, including John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olson, Josef and Anni Albers, Paul Goodman, and Robert Rauschenberg. However, it also had massive financial difficulties during its tenure, requiring a large amount of determination to keep the college in operation. Duberman documents Black Mountain college in all its stages, from its most brilliant moments of self-reinvention to its lowest moments of petty infighting, creating a nuanced portrait of this community so essential to the development of American arts and counterculture.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Fascinating history with a resonance that far exceeds the experience of the Black Mountaineers themselves.”—Newsweek

“Reading the book, it is hard to imagine how it might have been done more intelligently.”—Catharine R. Stimpson, The Nation

“[Black Mountain] leaps beyond the discipline of history in its significance . . . Henceforth debates about the relation between historian and sources will have to take account of this radically new model for doing history.”—Jesse Lemisch, New York Times Book Review

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Asian American Civil Rights in the South

Asian Americans often fell into a middle ground in the Jim Crow South, for although they were not black, they were also not considered white, and thus were subject to school segregation, antimiscegenation laws, and discriminatory business practices. In A Different Shade of Justice, author Stephanie Hinnershitz explores the lives of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and, later, Vietnamese and Indian Americans in the South, and how they faced obstacles similar to those experienced by African Americans in their fight for civil and human rights.

As Asian Americans attempted to establish themselves in the South, they found that institutionalized racism thwarted their efforts time and again. In order to combat this, they organized carefully constructed legal battles that often traveled to the state and federal supreme courts, starting with the formation of Chinese and Japanese communities in the early twentieth century and going up through Indian hotel owners’ battles against business discrimination in the 1980s and ’90s. Hinnershitz draws from legislative and legal records as well as oral histories, memoirs, and newspapers in order to tell the story of how Asian American political actors and civil rights activists challenged existing definitions of rights and justice in the South.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Readable and engaging, and recommended to anyone interested in the intersections of race, gender, ethnicity, and labor in the United States.”—Arkansas Historical Quarterly

“Provides a welcome addition to a flourishing body of scholarship on the experiences of Asian Americans and other immigrant groups in the U.S. South. This scholarship has challenged assumptions that the South was largely excepted from national histories of immigration, and it complicates understandings of racial identity in the region.”—Journal of Southern History

“This valuable work presents sophisticated and nuanced insight about Asians in the post-Civil War South . . . A welcome volume.”—Journal of American History

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard is often regarded as the founder of existentialism, writing about his new philosophy for almost a decade in the 1840s and 1850s until he died in 1855 at the age of 42. In Philosopher of the Heart, author Clare Carlisle writes this biography as far from Kierkegaard’s original perspective as she can in order to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom—as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

Kierkegaard was an incredibly prolific author, and much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, despite the fact that he left her before marriage in order to devote himself to writing. While living alone in Copenhagen, much of his writing centered around pursuing the question of existence, as well as exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him. When he finally died exhausted, he left his remarkable writings to his muse and erstwhile fiancée.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Engrossing . . . Carlisle has pulled off the feat of writing a truly Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard. Just as Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings were meant to enable the reader to understand different modes of existence from the inside, Carlisle’s biography takes us inside Kierkegaard’s troubled, complicated life, portraying a man who both compels and repels in turn.” —Julian Baggini, Financial Times

“For those interested in Kierkegaard’s legacy, but bewildered by the sheer volume of his writings, Carlisle opens a compact but insightful gateway onto his work, one designed to entrance as well as inform. For those of us who have been reading the man long enough to forget why we began, Carlisle offers a bracing reminder of the human drama, the passionate conviction, that drew us to Kierkegaard in the first place.” —Asher Gelzer-Govatos, The Russell Kirk Center

“It is a testimony to [Carlisle’s] skill that, as in a great novel, the portrayal of her protagonist is so vivid . . . She wonderfully conveys how, pelican-like, Kierkegaard tore his philosophy from his own breast.” —Jane O’Grady, Daily Telegraph

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.