In Paradise Lust, Brook Wilensky-Lanford introduces readers to the enduring modern quest to locate the Garden of Eden on Earth. It is an obsession that has consumed scientists and theologians alike, including the first president of Boston University and a knighted British engineer. Today the search has been taken up by amateurs. Inspired by an Eden seeker in her own family, Wilensky-Lanford writes of these unusual men and women with sympathy and wit. Read More

In The Face of Water, Sarah Ruden brilliantly and elegantly explains and celebrates the Bible’s writings. Singling out the most famous passages, such as the Genesis creation story, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes, Ruden reexamines and retranslates from the Hebrew and Greek what has been obscured and misunderstood over time. Read More

On February 8, Christopher Yates led a seminar discussion on Simone Weil. Using passages from Weil’s writing, Yates contemplates impressions about her life and ideas using the following seven guiding principles found in her work: devotion to intellectual honesty, the interplay between belief and certainty, proximity to unbelievers, divinely-inspired worldly order, susceptibility to false beauties, the love of neighbor, and obedience. Read More

Theodore Vial calls religion and race “conjoined twins” in the first line of his recent book, Modern Religion, Modern Race. These two concepts were born together and became key conceptual categories that have shaped the modern world. Read More

The prophetic witness of Martin Luther King Jr. did not arise spontaneously, social ethicist Gary Dorrien argues in his new book Breaking White Supremacy. Instead, the activism and ministry of King and other civil rights leaders was part of a long tradition of the black social gospel. Read More

On Thursday, February 8, Professor Christopher S. Yates will present a guest lecture on Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” Read More

The Project on Lived Theology is now accepting applications for the 2018 Summer Internship in Lived Theology, an immersion program designed to complement the numerous existing urban and rural service immersion programs flourishing nationally and globally by offering a unique opportunity to think and write theologically about service. Read More

Gundamentalism and Where It Is Taking America is the work of James Atwood, a retired Presbyterian pastor and an avid deer hunter for half a century who has also been in the forefront of the faith community’s fight for two constitutional rights: the right to keep and bear arms and the right to live in domestic tranquility, free of gun violence. This book details his learning of a lifetime in the struggle for reasonable gun laws in America. Read More

With the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death approaching in April 2018, University of Virginia’s Project on Lived Theology is pleased to announce a new, $30,000 initiative, Prophet with a Pencil: The Continuing Significance of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ Read More

On January 3rd, Project Director Charles Marsh published his latest essay in Religion and Politics. The piece, entitled “The NRA’s Assault on Christian Faith and Practice,” traces the American response to the laws regulating and statistics surrounding gun ownership and examines their underlying ties with Christianity today. Read More