Overview of the Project
" 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."
The Project on Lived Theology was established in the summer of 2000 with a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment. Our mission is to clarify the interconnection of theology and lived experience and
by so doing, to offer academic resources to the pursuit of social justice and human flourishing.
With more than 400 alumni of our workgroups and programs, the Project 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 plumb the theological depth and detail of lived experience.
It is our conviction that the patterns and practices of religious communities offer rich and generative 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, the lived experiences of faith 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 Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology is a national workgroup of theologians, scholars, practitioners and religion writers, working together on eight single-authored books. Click here to learn more about the Virginia Seminar.
The Spring Institute for Lived Theology is an annual institute for theologians, scholars, and practitioners focused on issues of faith and social practice. Click here to learn more about the Institute.