The Virginia Seminar

Past Participants

Carlos M. N. Eire

Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John's University and the University of Virginia, and resided for two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His acclaimed books include War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (Cambridge, 1995), and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1400-1700 (Yale University Press, forthcoming). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (Prentice Hall, 1997). His memoir of the Cuban Revolution, Waiting for Snow in Havana (Free Press, 2003), which won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2003, is being translated into Dutch, Finnish, German, Czech, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

For the Virginia Seminar, Eire wrote two books. A Very Brief History of Eternity (Princeton, 2009) discusses how conceptions of forever, or eternity, have evolved through time in Western culture. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy (Free Press, 2010), begins where his first memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), ends, and tells the story of his life as a refugee in the United States. Read an excerpt from the book.

Mark Gornik

Mark Gornik is the Director of City Seminary of New York. (Read his blog.) The founding pastor of New Song Community Church in Sandtown (Baltimore), he and his wife Rita moved to New York City seven years ago to share in beginning New Song Community Church in Harlem. Mark is the author of To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City (Eerdmans, 2002) and has a Ph.D. from the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, New College, University of Edinburgh. Read about Gornik's history and his sense of vocation in Faith & Leadership.

During his tenure with the Virginia Seminar, Gornik wrote Word Made Global: African Christianity in Motion (Eerdmans, 2011), a narrative of the lived theologies of immigrant Christian communities in New York City. Word Made Global won the 2012 Christianity Today Book Award in the Missions/Global Affairs category.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl’s memoirs include A Romantic Education (Norton, 1999), about her Czech heritage and Virgin Time (Random House, 1993), about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life. In 2000 her collection of essays about memory and autobiography, I Could Tell You Stories (Norton, 1999), was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

Hampl is Regents' Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota where she teaches creative writing. She is also on the permanent faculty of The Prague Summer Program.

Blue Arabesque: In Search of the Sublime (a meditation on the odalisque figure in Western art) came out from Harcourt in 2006. Her family memoir, The Florist’s Daughter, was published by Harcourt in 2007. Hampl is currently working on The Virtue of Heresy: Travels on the Margins of Christianity, a sample of which can be read here.

Susan R. Holman

Susan R. Holman grew up in New England, where both her grandfather (a farmer) and great-grandfather (a doctor) were "overseers of the poor" for their villages. A failed gardener who is more likely to faint at the sight of blood than apply first aid, she opted early in life to pursue a more bookish and urban career, first in public health nutrition and then yielding to a lifelong interest in religious studies. After Harvard Divinity School studies to learn Greek and the context of early Christianity and culture, she completed doctoral research at Brown, with a dissertation on early Christian sermons on poverty, disease, and hunger. She is author of Essentials of Nutrition for the Health Professions (JB Lippincott, 1987), The Hungry are Dying: Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia (Oxford University Press, 2001), Basil of Caesarea: On Fasting, Feasts and Faith (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, in preparation), and editor of Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society (BakerAcademic, 2008).

Susan’s book project with the Virginia Seminar, God Knows There's Need: Christian Responses to Poverty, which was supported by both The Project on Lived Theology and a 2007-2008 Christian Faith and Life Grant from the Louisville Institute, was published by Oxford University Press. Click here and here to read excerpts, and here to read an interview with her. She is now working on a new book (also under contract with Oxford) that is tentatively titled Just Believing: A Guide to Human Rights for People of Faith.

Holman is an academic writer, editor, occasional guest speaker and lecturer, and sometimes-mentor in religion, early Christianity, and social justice issues. She has worked as a research writer at Harvard University's François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health, as Managing Editor for Health and Human Rights: An International Journal (for which Dr. Paul Farmer is Editor-in-Chief), and as an independent scholar and consultant in poverty studies in religious history as well as in health and human rights as it relates to international poverty, religion and nutrition. She also directs a non-profit (free, open-access) website to encourage ecumenical and cross-disciplinary dialogue between the academic study of religion and contemporary community service (www.povertystudies.org).

Read "Centuries of Need", an article about Susan Holman's academic work on Christian responses to povery in the Spring 2010 issue of Tufts Nutrition.

Alan Jacobs

Alan Jacobs is Professor of English and Director of the Faith and Learning Program at Wheaton College in Illinois. His books include What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 1998), A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age (Brazos Press, 2001), A Theology of Reading: the Hermeneutics of Love (Westview Press, 2001), Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (Eerdmans, 2004), The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), Original Sin: A Cultural History, (HarperOne, 2008) and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2008). He has written for a wide range of periodicals, including The American Scholar, Books & Culture, First Thing, and The Oxford American. Jacobs' latest publications are Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant (Eerdmans, 2010) and a forthcoming critical edition of W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety (Princeton University Press, 2010).

As a member of the Virginia Seminar, Jacobs wrote The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction (Oxford, 2011) and numerous essays including "The Life of Trees", (Books & Culture, July 1, 2008). He also created the Gospel of the Trees website, where the Bible is viewed as a story about trees. Read an interview with Alan Jacobs and an excerpt from The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

Charles Marsh

Marsh is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the University of Virginia, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1989. The Project on Lived Theology is a research community that seeks to understand the social consequences of religious beliefs.

After publishing his doctoral dissertation Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology ( Oxford, 1994), he began considering the religious and moral paradoxes of his white southern Protestant upbringing. He was struck by the complex ways theological commitments and convictions came into dramatic conflict in the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. The religious beliefs and social practices of ordinary people of faith illuminated a new way of writing theology for him, the first fruit being God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, 1997) which won the 1998 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

His memoir, The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South (Basic Books, 2001), is a coming of age account of a minister’s son in a small Mississippi town that was home to the Christian terrorist organization called the White Knight of the Ku Klux Klan. In his 2005 book, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (Basic Books), he developed a new narrative of the Civil Rights Movement based on Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “the end [of the movement] is not the protest, the end is not the boycott; the end is redemption, reconciliation and the creation beloved community.’

Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (Oxford, June 2007) offered a theological analysis of the Christian Right’s support of the presidency of George W. Bush and was excerpted in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and the Boston Globe. 

Marsh is delighted to have co-authored a book with his lifelong friend and mentor, the civil rights activist John M. Perkins. The book, titled Welcoming Justice: God's Movement Toward Beloved Community, was published by InterVarsity Press in Fall 2009 and is based on lectures given at the Teaching Communities Conference at the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation.

Marsh is currently writing a new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This will be the first major trade biography in several decades of the German theologian and dissident. The book will be published by Knopf (New York) and Ullstein (Berlin).

Marsh is also the recipient of a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellows in the Creative Arts.

Charles Mathewes

Charles Mathewes earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is currently Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Director of Education at the Center on Religion and Democracy, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on theology, ethics, politics, and culture. He is the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, where his term runs from 2006 to 2010. His first book, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. Mathewes is also co-editor of Religion, Law and the Role of Force: A Study of Their Influence on Conflict and on Conflict Resolution (Transnational Publishers, 2003) with Joseph Coffey and co-editor of Having: Property, Possession and Religious Discourse with William Schweiker (Eerdmans, 2004). His book A Theology of Public Life, (Cambridge University Press, August 2007), explores the challenges and ascetical benefits of public engagement for religious believers in modern democracies.

For the Virginia Seminar, Mathewes wrote The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Faith in Dark Times (Eerdmans, 2010), a primer on Christian citizenship in the public square. Read an interview about the book. Read an excerpt from the book.