RESEARCH STAFF

Charles Marsh, Project Director

Charles Marsh is Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. His books include God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton), which won the 1998 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer  (Knopf), which was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and won the Christianity Today Book Award in Biography/History. His monograph on theology and biography, Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand: A Life Revisited, will be published in April 2023 with Wipf & Stock. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, Karen Wright Marsh.

Jessica Seibert, Project Manager

Jessica Seibert

Jessica graduated from Colorado College with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. Before joining the project team, she worked extensively in grant management at the University of Colorado. She and her husband, a basketball coach, have two daughters and many animals. They all live together in a cooperative household with extended family, and Jessica is the house chef for ten people. While cooking occupies much of her free time, she also enjoys gardening, reading and sports.

Lauren F. Winner, Editorial and Literary Advisor

lauren winner web

Lauren, who has served as vicar at Saint Joseph’s Episcopal Church in Durham, N.C., since July 2021, provides editorial guidance for the Project on Lived Theology. When she’s not at “St Joe’s,” you can find her in the classroom at Duke Divinity School, where she is associate professor of Christian spirituality, or at her desk, where she might be reading or writing about overlooked biblical images of God or the history of Christian prayer. Lauren’s books include Girl Meets God (Algonquin Books, 2002), Mudhouse Sabbath (Paraclete Press, 2007), A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith (Yale, 2010), Still (HarperOne, 2013), Wearing God (HarperOne, 2016), and The Dangers of Christian Practice (Yale, 2018). She has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book WorldPublishers WeeklyBooks and Culture, and Christianity Today, and her essays have been included in several volumes of The Best Christian Writing.

RESEARCH FELLOWS

EMILY MILLER

Emily Miller is a third year undergraduate at the University of Virginia, majoring in religious studies and minoring in data science. In Summer 2022, Emily was the Project on Lived Theology’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow, in which she worked with Guy Aiken to research and write about the histories of First Baptist Church on Main Street and First Baptist Church on Park Street in Charlottesville. Publishing bi-weekly articles on the PLT website, Emily’s research included conducting interviews throughout Charlottesville, visiting historical sites, and going through local archives. She also is a researcher for the Global Inquirer, a UVA student research podcast, and the UVA Sports Analytics and Statistics Lab. Her research interests include liberation theology, queer theology, and public history.  

LARYCIA HAWKINS

Larycia Hawkins is the Abd el-Kader Visiting Faculty Fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. At the Institute, she is working on the Race, Faith, and Culture Project, which examines how multiracial communities of faith could impact American race relations, and the Pluralism Project, which studies changing majorities and minorities. Larycia’s publications include “Prophetic and Priestly: The Politics of a Black Catholic Parish” (2015) and “Jesus and Justice: The Moral Framing of the Black Agenda” (2015). Her writing, speaking, teaching, and scholarship are squarely animated by a conviction that political science should be relevant to the real world.

ETHAN SHEARER

Ethan Shearer is a PhD student in UVA’s Department of Religious Studies, where his research interests include public and political theology, Wesleyan thought, and the work of Dorothee Soelle and P. T. Forsyth. He is interested in working on a dissertation about theologies of sanctification and human need. Prior to coming to UVA, Ethan earned MDiv and MTS degrees from Wesley Theological Seminary, and a BA in Sociology/Anthropology and Religious Studies from Elizabethtown College. He now serves as a United Methodist minister in Orange County, Va., after having pastored a church in rural Pennsylvania.

Peter Slade

Peter Slade teaches courses in the history of Christianity and Christian thought at Ashland University in Ohio. His research interests include religion and the long Civil Rights Movement, and ecclesial practices of reconciliation and resistance. Pete’s scholarship and teaching are grounded in his work and life in the church. His interest in the lived ecclesiologies of Christian communities led to his first book, Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2009), an interdisciplinary study of an ecumenical racial reconciliation initiative in Mississippi. Pete is co-editor of and contributor to two volumes connected with the Project on Lived Theology: Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) and Lived Theology in Method, Style, and Pedagogy (Oxford University Press, 2016). He contributed a chapter to the Project’s Can I Get a Witness? (Eerdmans, 2019), and is a co-editor and contributor to the companion volume People Get Ready (Eerdmans, forthcoming). Pete’s current research focuses on the teaching of race, memory, justice, and reconciliation in church-related colleges and universities in the United States.

HEATHER WARREN

Heather Warren is an associate professor in the religious studies department at UVA, where she specializes in the history of American religious life and thought from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Her research has also carried her into the field of American religious autobiography. Heather contributed a paper to the Lived Theology and Community Building Workgroup (meeting #3). She also gave a guest lecture, “Civil Rights and the Habit of Autobiographical Theological Reflection,” as part of the “Thursday Nights: Conversations in Lived Theology” series. Heather has served as a Summer Internship in Lived Theology mentor. As a PLT research fellow, she is studying U.S. southern ministers and the Protestant Hour radio show.

 

 


 

STAFF ALUMNI