Dr. Marie Griffith to speak on Christians, sex, and politics

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Dr. Marie GriffithOn Wednesday, September 18, Dr. Marie Griffith will give a lecture entitled, “Christians, Sex, and Politics: An American History.” Dr. Griffith is a U.Va. alumna, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.

For more than 50 years, one of the most dramatically unifying themes for rallying conservative Christians to the American voting booth has unmistakably been sex.  This talk will explore crucial episodes in this history and the religious wranglings over such issues as birth control, literary censorship, chastity, marriage, and sex education: the many topics that have set sexuality and gender squarely at the center of political conflict in the U.S.

Dr. Griffith’s lecture will be in Monroe Hall at 5:00 p.m. on September 18. This event is sponsored by The Virginia Center for the Study of Religion.

Project on Lived Theology launches new book on John M. Perkins

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Mobilizing for the Common GoodAs mentioned in our last news post, the Project on Lived Theology is celebrating John Perkins through the launch of a new published work Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins, edited by Peter Slade, Charles Marsh, and Peter Goodwin Heltzel.

On July 11 of this year, the essays written for the 2009 Spring Institute for Lived Theology were published in Mobilizing for the Common Good. Peter Slade describes the work as an exploration of “the life and legacy” of John M. Perkins, influential community organizer, minister, speaker, writer, and Civil Rights activist.

The book will be publicly launched on September 13th in a session at the Christian Community Development Association National Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Then on September 17th, Peter Slade will give a lecture on John Perkins at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson Mississippi as part of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History program History is Lunch.

Check back later this week and next for posts from Peter Slade as he journeys through Louisiana and up to Jackson, Mississippi to celebrate John Perkins and this new work about his life and theology.

The Project on Lived Theology celebrates John M. Perkins

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Cultivate CCDA ConferenceOn September 11, the 25th annual Christian Community Development Association National Conference convenes in New Orleans. The conference runs four days, and is packed with workshops, plenary sessions, Bible studies, and exhibits.

John M. Perkins, the founder of CCDA, is an influential community organizer, minister, speaker, writer, and Civil Rights activist. One of the sessions at the conference is a book launch for Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins. This book project based is on the papers presented at the Project on Lived Theology’s 2009 Spring Institute for Lived Theology that focused on the life, ministry and theology of John Perkins.

We’ll be featuring the book in our news on the PLT homepage in the next couple of weeks, but meanwhile, take a look at this video from SILT 2009 of Charles Marsh in conversation with John Perkins. If you’d like your own free DVD copy, email us at livedtheology@virginia.edu to request one.

What is the Project on Lived Theology?

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A new school year is upon us! Allow us to (re)introduce ourselves.

The Project on Lived Theology is a research community housed in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Our mission is to understand the social consequences of theological commitments, to foster collaborative research between religion scholars and practitioners, and to discern the wisdom of faith lived in service to others.

What We Do

SILT 2013 LogoWe have several main initiatives. The Spring Institute for Lived Theology is an annual institute for theologians, scholars, and practitioners focused on issues of faith and social practice. Past SILT themes include social hope, the built environment, the language of peace, Civil Rights leader John M. Perkins, migration and the borderlands, and the enterprise of lived theology itself. The most recent SILT, held at U.Va. in May, celebrated ten years of spring institutes and furthered a book project that will share the enterprise of lived theology with a broader audience.

Virginia Seminar BooksThe Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology supports theologians, scholars, and practitioners in writing single-authored books on theology and lived experience. Seminar members receive research funding and meet yearly to engage in creative and fruitful exchange. One of the distinctive features of the Virginia Seminar is that it brings 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. Virginia Seminar books aim to be intellectually sophisticated yet accessible to a broad audience.

Summer Internship in Lived TheologyThe Summer Internship in Lived Theology supports two or three U.Va. students annually in a summer immersion experience designed to foster reflection on service as a theological activity. Students design and propose internships with established service organizations, and selected interns are matched with a theological mentor with whom they craft a reading list for the summer. Interns blog in conversation with their site experiences, readings, and conversations with mentors, and in the fall, interns present their reflections on the experiences as a whole at an event on Grounds.

The Project on Lived Theology also hosts occasional lectures and seminars, which are publicized through our website, Facebook page, and mailing list as they are scheduled.

Our Resources

Mobilizing for the Common GoodAs a research community, the Project produces a wide range of resources. Several of our Spring Institutes have produced books, including Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins and Religion and Politics in America’s Borderlands, both recently published. A book from the 2011 and 2013 SILTs is also underway. More book listings, as well as a collection of articles, audio files, videos, photos, and presentations can be found on our website.

The Project also houses a physical and digital archive entitled, The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama. The archive is highly interactive and brings the theological drama of the American Civil Rights Movement to life. Through personal interviews and primary documentary evidence, much of which is previously unpublished, the archive tells the stories of the time period in light of the hypothesis that God was–in some perplexingly and hitherto undelineated way–present there. You can read more about it here, or visit it here.

Strange Glory CoverProject executive director, Charles Marsh, is teaching a course this fall entitled Kingdom of God in America. The course examines the influence of theological ideas on social movements in twentieth and twenty-first century America. Its primary historical focus is the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s but will also explore the student movements of the late 1960’s and a variety of faith-based social movements of recent decades. Professor Marsh’s forthcoming book, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is scheduled for release on April 22.

We invite you to connect with the Project through our website, Facebook page, and email list. And we encourage you to take advantage of our resources, especially the Civil Rights archive. Please email us with any questions, and best wishes for a great semester at U.Va.

Virginia Seminar member Alan Jacobs publishes biography of The Book of Common Prayer

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Alan JacobsAlan Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Baylor University and member of the first class of the Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology, has just published The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. This new book is part of the Princeton University Press series, Lives of Great Religious Books and will be released on September 30.

The publisher introduces it this way:

While many of us are familiar with such famous words as, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here. . .” or “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” we may not know that they originated with The Book of Common Prayer, which first appeared in 1549. Like the words of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, the language of this prayer book has saturated English culture and letters. Here Alan Jacobs tells its story.Jacobs shows how TheBook of Common Prayer–from its beginnings as a means of social and political control in the England of Henry VIII to its worldwide presence today–became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of religious life for many.

Read more or purchase the book here.

Listen to “A Seminar on Faith and Writing” by acclaimed author, Carlene Bauer

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Bauer Flyer 2.1 (correct)

As part of the 2013 Virginia Seminar in June, author Carlene Bauer offered a lecture on faith and writing that was open to the public. The audio of her fabulous presentation is available now, by clicking here. Please check back later for a written transcript of this lecture.

Bauer’s most recent work, Frances and Bernard, is a narrative through letters exchanged between two writers on the rise who meet in an artists’ colony in 1957. Her characters are inspired by the lives of Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. Read the New York Times review of her work here.

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.

An Open Door

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Thinking ahead to the end of the summer, I chose to save Eberhard Arnold’s short piece, “Why We Live in Community” as a summative reading, suitable for a reflective last week on the job. Arnold’s essay is accompanied by two discussions by Thomas Merton, a 20th century Catholic theologian (and one of my favorite thinkers). Arnold writes that community is animated by God’s triumph of love over death (and the great hope this implies), which in turn is enacted by ordinary people. Ever the practical and deliberate thinker, Merton interprets Arnold’s words for the modern context, calling for a renewed commitment to faith in the power of the collective. This quote from Arnold, which I think best represents my education on the value of community, is worth repeating in full:

Community life is possible only in this all-embracing Spirit and in those things it brings with it: a deepened spirituality and the ability to experience life more keenly and intensely. Surrendering to the Spirit is such a powerful experience that we can never feel equal to it. In truth, the Spirit alone is equal to itself. It quickens our energies by firing the inmost core – the soul of the community—to white heat. When this core burns and blazes to the point of sacrifice, it radiates far and wide. Community life is like martyrdom by fire: it means the daily sacrifice of all our strength and all our rights, all the claims we commonly make on life and assume to be justified. In the symbol of fire the individual logs burn away so that, united, its glowing flames send our warmth and light again and again into the land. (14)

The meat of my summer work is now behind me, and this week is full of reflection and transition. To live well in community necessitates the sharpening of my life perspectives, and becoming more attuned to the state of the world. It means becoming emotionally keyed in to the delicate fluctuations of other community members, and learning to read the ambiguous and fluid moods of a group. This summer has seared in me a new type of insight and a new lens through which to see the world. This may sound a bit corny and contrite, but it is true. These new realizations are seared in the Light of the Spirit.

The big question I face now is, where do I go from here?

The “white heat” of community is the new sharpened focus I bring to my work and understanding of the world. Work becomes urgent and direct. Each action has a purpose and reaction. “White heat” seems appropriate because of how clarifying this new lens is. Presuppositions of privilege and what normative, human life should be have been burned back to expose unalienable needs. Human desires for security, trust, affection, and belonging—these gifts of grace are what I have found most indivisible and most precious. The white heat of this loving and inclusive community has burned away all excess claims I thought people were somehow born with to reveal true joy of life. Homelessness and poverty are still serious issues, and are not problems to be glamorized. The right to dignified shelter and the ability to self-determine the course of one’s life should never be left unresolved. Yet in this complexly knit group of people, reality was pared down to the bareness of love. The individual logs burn away so that the core of the fire becomes clear. The secret of community lies in the power of free choice, the individual choice to walk towards God’s unity; “it becomes life’s most vital and intense energy” (22).

After ten weeks at the Haven, my perspective on the world is profoundly different. I would even say that this summer will turn out to be a defining moment in my life. My time at the Haven has “messed up” the tidy plans I had for myself for a neat and step-by-step academic future. Life feels too urgent and too immediate to live separately from a community in need; I feel “antsy” considering any career path that would isolate me from the parts of life that are harder to face. How can I focus my intellect and energy on anything besides aiding the needy when there is such a desperate call for aid and attention? I found myself feeling desperate, lost, and slightly overwhelmed at the hugeness of something like poverty. Even if I commit my life to imitating the work of Mother Theresa, how will I know that I have made a difference? In other words, in what way will I measure the success of my life? Speaking this worry aloud to a mentor, a good friend, and a parent helped me realize how unnecessary this worry is. I was forgetting one of the main themes I have afforded so much thought: relationality. A career path or a specified graduate degree will not pigeonhole me into any kind of life, nor will it prevent me from engaging in a community as an authentic and compassionate participant.

As one actor, I am not integral to the community. The Spirit alone is equal to itself. My departure will not break the community. Yes, I have learned more than I thought possible this summer. The friendships I have formed at the Haven will sustain me through the next year, and fortunately, I can continue to grow within and by them over the coming Charlottesville seasons. However, I am not the most important thing that has ever happened to the Haven, but am one spoke that helped turn a great wheel for a little while. A serendipitous look into another Thomas Merton collection unearthed this quote from his journal composed on a pilgrimage through Asia: “Such is the door that ends all doors: the unbuilt, the impossible, the undestroyed, through which all the fires go when they have ‘gone out.”’[i] My light has not “gone out” upon departure from the Haven’s daily world, but will be burning with me in every angle by which I now better understand the gifts God hands me every morning upon waking. The door has not closed.

Working a breakfast shift in the Haven's kitchen

[i] The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1973. Pages 154-155.