Overview of the Project

The Project on Lived Theology was established in the summer of 2000 for the purpose of bringing clarity to the interconnection of theology and lived experience. The Project seeks to offer academic resources to the pursuit of social justice and, towards this end, offers a variety of familiar and unconventional spaces where students, theologians and scholars of religion can collaborate with practitioners and non-academics. We produce books, scholarly and popular essays, field reports, oral histories, and other resources that explore the interconnection of theological commitments and lived experience. In addition, we encourage our participants, fellows, students and interns to strive in their various research endeavors towards results that will both stimulate intellectual discussion and inspire concrete proposals for the work of building just and humane communities.

The Project is based on the rationale that the everyday patterns and practices of religious communities, specifically in their varied displays of compassionate action in service to others, offer rich and untapped material for theological inquiry. These patterns and practices are not just ways of "doing things" (as the historian Wayne Meeks has written in one of his essential studies of early Christian communities), but they are also ways of "saying things": practices and patterns are "communicative". As theologians and scholars of religion, we further believe that, properly interpreted, these practices and patterns are communicative not only of a religious community's collective self-understanding but of modes of divine presence as well. The Project further endeavors to demonstrate the importance of theological ideas in the public conversation about civic responsibility and social progress. Theology matters, now more than ever, and it is our hope not only to provide analytical attention to religion's role in shaping human behavior, but further to retrieve valuable resources from the Christian faith and its particular conceptions of God and the good, and more broadly from the shared beliefs and values of the Abrahamic tradition, which assist students, scholars and practitioners in the work of building just and compassionate communities.

"The important thing is that we should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, at sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perceptions of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, free, less corruptible." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology is a national theological workgroup comprising theologians, scholars, practitioners and religion writers, which will produce eight single-authored books exploring various dimensions of faith of lived experience for a wide reading audience. Click here to learn more about the Virginia Seminar.

The Spring Institute for Lived Theology is an annual week-long institute for theologians, scholars, and practitioners. Click here to learn more about the Institute.

The Project on Lived Theology
125 Halsey Hall • University of Virginia • P.O. Box 400126 • Charlottesville, VA 22904-4126

Phone: 434-924-6743 • Fax: 434-243-5784 • Email: pltheology@virginia.edu