September 17, 2026

On Sunday, June 28, 2026, PLT Director Charles Marsh spoke on the theme “Let Us Now Praise the Peculiar People” in the historic John M. Hall Auditorium at Bay View Chautauqua in Petoskey, Michigan. Clustering around the story of his visit to the grave of Fannie Lou Hamer in the summer of 1993, Marsh invited listeners to consider what it might mean to inhabit the present faithfully: to live with courage and compassion, and to bear the distinctive witness of a people called to hope. Read More

June 18, 2026

Carolyn Crowder’s remarkable documentary film At the River: Grace and Struggle in the Segregated South is an impressive oral history project, a self-examination of the psychological damage inflicted by white supremacy on white children, a theological reflection on the failure of the white southern church, and a melodic love letter to the few white Presbyterian ministers who saved the filmmaker from the meanness of the religious white world that raised her. Read More

June 4, 2026

On April 2, 2026, Professor Vincent Lloyd of Villanova University paid a virtual visit to my undergraduate course Religion 3730, “Conversations in Religion”. 

In his lecture, Professor Lloyd focused on Fanon’s ideas about religion, violence, and the tradition of Black atheism – and pressed the question of how religious languages of reconciliation and more radical, abolitionist gestures of uprooting domination collide in Fanon’s account of decolonization. Read More

February 4, 2026

On the 120th anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birth (February 4th), Russell sits down with Charles Marsh—author of Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—to ask why Bonhoeffer still captivates Christians and what his witness demands from us now. Together, they explore how Bonhoeffer recognized the moral collapse of the German church earlier than most, and why he insisted that confessing Christ’s lordship must sometimes give way to concrete, costly action in history. Read More

December 12, 2025

Acknowledge anxiety’s capacity to instruct. Kierkegaard speaks of being educated by anxiety as an apprenticeship with truth—an opening, an exposure to our ownmost fragility. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”: it strips away every false security and brings us face to face with the desperate, idolatrous ways we deny our selfish desires. Read More

September 22, 2025

If a federal agent intent on advancing an ‘America First’ agenda in the nation’s universities were to review the syllabus of my undergraduate course the Kingdom of God in America, they might assume I was a reliable ally of the campus’s conservative minority. “Why the Woke Left Makes Nothing Happen” was the title of one section exploring the late 1960s countercultural movements. Read More

April 23, 2025

In this second part of our conversation with Dr. Charles Marsh, we dive deeper into the moments that shaped Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vocation as a pastor theologian. From Harlem to Rome to a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria, we explore how Bonhoeffer’s encounters with global Christianity—and especially the Black Church in America—inspired his vision of a concrete, lived theology. Read More

March 21, 2025

In an article published by Religion News titled “Both right and left claim Bonhoeffer as a champion. Here’s why his ideas fit neither,” Charles Marsh explores the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s politics, particularly how he is used by both the right and left as a champion, when his Christian behavior and attitude fit neither. Read More

March 21, 2025

How did Dietrich Bonhoeffer become the theologian and pastor we remember today? Cardigan and Collar podcast in conversation with Dr. Charles Marsh. Read More

February 24, 2025
By Charles Marsh

Director Charles Marsh wrote this essay in January of 2013 about the vision of justice and mercy of Martin Luther King Jr. Read More

January 6, 2025
by Charles Marsh

The Rev. Dr. Charles Robert Marsh, a Southern Baptist minister who served as senior pastor at Atlanta’s Second Ponce de Leon Baptist Church from 1978 to 1993 died on Christmas Eve while in hospice care at Lenbrook in Atlanta, Georgia. Marsh, a passionate teacher of the Bible, and a local religious leader in the desegregation of public schools in the South, was 92-years old. Read More

December 2, 2024
by Charles Marsh

I shared this short essay with my students recently. It’s a piece I wrote for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin in Spring 2005. Several students in the class thought it speaks directly to the current situation, so we’re sharing it here in Theology Now! The idea of holy silence and political resistance came to me while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, in the section on “silence before, under, and coming out of the Word”, when Bonhoeffer writes of a silence that brings “purification, clarification, and concentration upon the essential thing”; which I would develop in my 2007 book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (Oxford University Press). Read More