August 6, 2024

When the interview began it was hard for me to reconcile the man before me—calm and almost elegant in his pinstriped suit—with everything else I knew of him: that he had reigned over a campaign of terror in 1960s Mississippi. On that night, in the summer of 1994, the former Imperial Wizard of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had not yet been convicted of murder—nor for his part in the 1964 deaths of James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, nor in the 1966 firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer. Read More

July 17, 2024

In this recent exchange with award-winning filmmaker Martin Doblmeier, Charles Marsh discusses the Barmen Declaration and Bonhoeffer’s theological critique of its limits. Read More

May 24, 2024

In this public talk from Charlottesville’s St. Paul’s Memorial Church on March 17, 2024, Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh explores transformative impressions through the lens of Bonhoeffer’s Lenten experiences and reflections. The audience is invited to consider how Bonhoeffer brought unity to the elusive ideals of beauty and justice. Read More

May 9, 2024

Charles Marsh reflects on his 1994 Interview with Sam Bowers. And his 1997 Oxford American article “Rendezvous with the Wizard”, available now for the first time in digital format. Read More

May 7, 2024

The inaugural issue of The Mahle Lectures presents content from the workshops and some of the conversations at the Lift Every Voice and Teach Colloquium. Read More

March 20, 2024

Carlos Eire, T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies and a longtime associate of the Project on Lived Theology, has recently published a startling and stunning history of levitation and bilocation in, principally, the early modern era. They Flew recovers the history of devout Christians, well, flying – rising from the earth, moving through the air. Read More

October 17, 2023

We are pleased to share new research from Professor Heather Warren, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at UVA, and The Rev. Dr. at St. Paul’s Memorial Church. Heather began with the hunch that the largely forgotten story of the Protestant Hour Radio Show offers important insights into the culture of mid-century Protestant liberalism in the United States. Read More

July 6, 2023

“My name is Will D. Campbell. I am who my momma and daddy named me the night I was born. I live in Tennessee. I have three children. I am a preacher of the Good News. God was in Christ reconciling the world. Not will be, not perhaps, not just if we’re good boys and girls; but was, once and for all. We are now one people. We have been reconciled to God and each other. Racism is a violation of that fact. Nations are a violation; classes are a violation; joining the country club is a violation. I believe God was in Christ, goddammit, that’s what I believe!”

Will D.Campbell (1924 -2013), when asked by a group of white pastors in Georgia, in the early 1960’s why he opposed racial segregation Read More

May 3, 2023

I think there is a very strong parallel between the God of Jesus Christ as so rendered in those essays, and other essays of that period, and the God that emerges in the course of herapeutic work that requires the disentangling of our images of God from their finite sorts of references that have emerged because of family, through tradition, through culture. These essays are just like prose-psalms on speed, of the God who comes to humanity from the far country, from the far away country of the triune God, who calls us into the strange new world, who stands over our finite loyalties and our unceasing production of the false God, both in judgment and in grace. Read More

March 24, 2023

I’ve long admired Jenny McBride as a scholar who exemplifies civil courage and “honest patriotism” (in the words of the late Donald Shriver) in the vocation of public theologian. I’m delighted to commend her remarkable new book, You Shall Not Condemn: A Story of Faith and Advocacy on Death Row as a significant contribution to enterprise of lived theology. Read More

March 20, 2023

Compared with the formal rigors of the doctoral dissertation, the Barcelona sermons are both literary and uninhibited. Bonhoeffer found writing them a great liberation, for the exercise drew on his musical gifts and artistic intuitions. Indeed the lyrical and expressive expressive sermons from Spain are among his most beautiful writings. A mystical current guides the pen. He would say that he felt as if “a theology of … spring and summer” was replacing “the Berlin winter theology”. Read More

February 10, 2023

Bonhoeffer declares to us anew the hope that bears the sorrows of the world: “Again and again in these turbulent times, we lose sight of why life is really worth living. In truth, it is like this: If the earth was deemed worthy to bear the human being Jesus Christ, if a human being like Jesus lived, then our life as human beings has meaning.” Read More