The Virginia Seminar

The Virginia Seminar in Lived Theology is a theological initiative that offers theologians and scholars of religion an opportunity to work and write in sustained engagement with critical issues in religion and public life; and it further provides practitioners the time to think and write in sustained and direct engagement with theologians and scholars.

The purpose of the Seminar is to provide research support for eight scholars and practitioners and opportunities for creative and fruitful exchange. The Seminar will produce eight single-volumes, modest in length and written in accessible prose, and form the backbone of a series on "theology and lived experience", published for a broad reading audience.

The books produced in the Virginia Seminar will be distinguished not only by their theological interests, but also by their writing. Our aim is not to produce monographs that will be of use only to academics, but to support intellectually sophisticated yet accessible books. Indeed, one of the distinctive features of the Virginia Seminar is that it will sometimes bring together scholars who have written primarily for academic readers with writers and scholars who have made their mark writing for more popular, general audiences. Thus, the Seminar will serve not only to give theologians, activists, and pastors time to write, it will help them craft lively, readable prose and give them concrete help communicating their valuable ideas to the largest possible audience. (We will occasionally hold day-long seminar that cover such basics as finding an agent, querying trade publishers, and pitching articles, essays and reviews to magazines.) Because the heart of the Project focuses on the connections between theology and "real life," we are committed to helping Project participants get their written work into the "real world."

Seminar participants are as follows:

 

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. He is the author of War Against the Idols (Cambridge, 1986), From Madrid to Purgatory (Cambridge, 1995), and Reformations: Early Modern Europe 1400-1700 (forthcoming, Yale, 2005). 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.

Carlos Eire's work with the Virginia Seminar will culminate in a book entitled A Brusque History of Eternity. A preview of this book can be found in a lecture series Eire gave at Princeton University in November 2007. To view the lectures go to Princeton's website.

 

Mark Gornik

Mark Gornik is the Director of City Seminary of New York. 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) and a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, New College, University of Edinburgh.

During his time with the Virginia Seminar, Mark Gornik is working on a book entitled Inescapably Belonging: How Christianity Can Connect a Divided World.

 

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl’s memoirs include A Romantic Education, about her Czech heritage, and Virgin Time, 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 , was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction.

Ms. 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 fall, 2006. Her family memoir, The Florist’s Daughter, will be published by Harcourt in October, 2007.

Patricia Hampl's work with the Virginia Seminar will culminate in a book entitled The Virtue of Heresy.

 

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. She studied nutrition at Valparaiso University, then at Frances Stern Nutrition Center and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.  Work with low income families in the inner city as a public health nutritionist convinced her of the importance of cultural and religious issues in food choices and the challenges of poverty.  She moved out of clinical practice to study early Christianity, first at Harvard Divinity School, where she received an MTS, then at Brown, where she received her PhD in religious studies. 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). She is now an independent scholar in poverty studies in religious history, and a consultant in health and human rights as it relates to international poverty, religion and nutrition.  She maintains a website to encourage ecumenical and cross-disciplinary dialogue between the academic study of religion and contemporary community service (www.povertystudies.org). Based in Boston, she enjoys folk and early music, public transportation, periodic religious silence, Indian food, and wind and rain. 

Susan’s book project with the Virginia Seminar, God Knows There's Need: Christian Responses to Poverty , is now in its final stages of pre-press revision, thanks to both the PLT and a 2007-08 Christian Faith and Life Grant from the Louisville Institute. Click here to read a brief excerpt from Chapter 1.

 

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 (1998), A Visit to Vanity Fair: Moral Essays on the Present Age (2001), A Theology of Reading: the Hermeneutics of Love (2001), and Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (2004). He has written for a wide range of periodicals, including The American Scholar, Books & Culture, First Things, and The Oxford American. His most recent book is The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Jacobs has two books coming out in the Spring of 2008, Original Sin: A Cultural History, and Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life.

Alan Jacobs' work with the Virginia Seminar will culminate in a book titled The Gospel of the Trees. Read a summary of this forthcoming book.

 

Charles Marsh

Professor of Religious Studies,(Christian Theology) and Director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, Marsh grew up in a minister's family in Alabama and Mississippi. He studied English literature and philosophy at Gordon College and philosophical theology at Harvard Divinity School and UVA, where he received his doctorate in 1989. Before coming to the Virginia faculty, he was a member of the Theology Department at Loyola College in Maryland and served as the theologian-in-residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Baltimore. After publishing 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 alive in the Civil Rights Movement. The theological 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 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, 2001), describes the complex layers of religious and cultural beliefs that shaped life in a small southern town in the final years of Jim Crow. His most recent book, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (Basic, 2005), offers a theological interpretation of the American search for authentic community in the decades since the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Charles Marsh's book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity, was recently published by Oxford University Press; he is also writing a second book for the Seminar called Testimony: A Theological Memoir.

 

Charles Mathewes

Charles Mathewes is 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 incoming editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, where his term runs from 2006 to 2010. He has written one book, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, published by Cambridge University Press, and edited two books, Religion, Conflict Resolution, and Humanitarian Intervention (Transnational Publishers) with Joseph Coffey, and Having: Property, Possession and Religious Discourse, with William Schweiker (Wm. B. Eerdmans). His most recent 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. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

During his time with the Virginia Seminar Charles Mathewes is working on a book provisionally titled Faith in Dark Times: An Augustinian Guide for Life in the 21st Century. Read an excerpt from the book.