The arc of justice… Campaigns focusing on gun reform achieved victory in several races across the country.
Read the article here.
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
BrieAnna Frank is a reporter for USA Today who’s covered numerous mass shootings. She’s also a first-year grad student in our Religious Studies Department. Her editor asked her to write from the first person about the University of Virginia mass shootings in Charlottesville. She delivered this gem by mid-afternoon.
We know he told his friend Hans Hildebrandt that only the Catholic Center Party had half a chance of defeating Hitler. While there is no easy parallel to U.S. politics, the core convictions of the Zentrum do not seem to lend themselves to the GOP.
The Catholic Center Party adhered to a strict separation of church and state, to belief in strong government and the welfare state, and to the facilitation of nonpartisan policy.
The Catholic Center attracted aristocrats, priests, bourgeoisie, peasants, and workers. While its membership was majority Catholic, the party remained interconfessional and committed to the democratic ideals of the Weimar Constitution. When the Nazis came into power the Zentrum was forced to dissolve itself as one of the last bürgerliche parties, not, alas before signing the Enabling Act and thus proving Bonhoeffer’s argument against Hildebrandt to have been naïve.
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
In his criticism of Tim Keller, Metaxas claims that Keller errs in the manner of the German Christians, by which he means that Keller, “preaching only the gospel” (sic!) refuses God’s “clear word” for the American church to act against the prevailing regime.
Metaxas says that Keller should instead preach in the manner of the Confessing Church, and in a bold venture of faith, denounce Biden with the clarity that Barmen denounced Hitler.
Two problems. First, the German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church did not “preach only the gospel”. It preached a Christianity antithetical to historic Christian orthodoxy. Spirit serves an ethno nationalism based on common blood who proceeds from the Father and the führer.
Second, the Confessing Church did not take a political stand, never denounced Hitler, never spoke & acted in defense of the Jewish people. Barmen affirmed the Lordship of Jesus Christ hard stop. The clear and persistent preaching of the Gospel would be sufficient. It was not.
Metaxas is so confused about the Kirchenkampf and where he stands in its repercussions that it’s best to let the great Fritz Stern have the last word. “In every way Metaxas betrays a quite amazing ignorance of the German language, German history, and German theology.”
For more on Metaxas, here’s one from the archives: Eric Metaxas’s Bonhoeffer Delusions
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
Patricia Lockwood’s 2017 memoir is like none you’ve read before, and not only because her father is an eccentric Catholic priest. When financial troubles lead Lockwood to move back into her father’s rectory, she records her family’s every idiosyncrasy, bringing the cast of characters alive in vividly human detail. By trade a poet, Lockwood’s prose regales with literary eloquence and whimsical, raunchy humor. Of the titular “priestdaddy,” she writes that her gun-and-guitar-toting Father “despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur.”
Though it reads like a sitcom, Priestdaddy weaves in somber reflection on family, belonging, and her experience in the Catholic Church. Leisurely humor is punctuated by grim stories of personal struggle and trauma. A witness and victim of the Church’s abuse, she denounces the exploitation of religious authority which afflicts her former community. While Lockwood remains critical of her Catholic upbringing, she notes a complicated yet enduring fondness for the lessons faith taught her. For the religious and the nonbelievers, the zany memoir invites heartfelt contemplation.
Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR
“Wildly entertaining…[Lockwood’s] humor and poetic descriptions are both impressively prolific, every sentence somehow funnier than the one you just read.”
—New York Magazine’s The Cut
“Gives ‘confessional memoir’ a new layer of meaning. From its hilariously irreverent first sentence, this daughter’s story of her guitar-jamming, abortion-protesting, God-fearing father will grab you by the clerical collar and won’t let go.”
—Vanity Fair
For more information on the publication, click here.
Thank you David Dark for showing us how to exercise civil courage and to write theological journalism. This is exactly the perspective so many of us are looking for in this moment.
Nashville’s entangled ‘Prayer Trade’ is a warning to the rest of the country
The Sigmund Freud Collection at the Library of Congress has been digitized and is now available online. Thanks to a grant from the UK-based Polonsky Foundation, this collection is open to the public.
Home movies included: Home movies from Freud Archives, 1939
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
Brace yourself for the coming debates on the national spike in violent crime. Here are four reasons grounded in empirical research and rational analysis. Thanks to the Brennen Center for Justice for this illuminating article.
1. 70% of the murders in 2020 were committed with a firearm — the highest share ever reported in FBI data going back to 1960.
2. Gun sales hit a record high in 2020.
3. Americans were more likely to open or conceal carry in 2020 than in any precious year.
4. “The time between a gun’s legal purchase and its appearance at a crime scene — a metric that law enforcement officials call a weapon’s “time-to-crime” — was much shorter in 2020 than in previous years.”
Conclusion: Increases in gun purchasing, expanded concealed and open carry laws, and SCOTUS overreach in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, are vexing trends for a country that is home to almost half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms.
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
by Emily Miller, 2022 Undergraduate Summer Research Fellow in Lived Theology
With the start of the Fall semester here at the University, I’m brought to the end of my summer internship with the Project on Lived Theology, and for the time being am pausing my research on First Baptist Church on Park Street and First Baptist Church on Main Street. I learned more this Summer through my research than I ever could have imagined and am beyond grateful for the opportunity that the Project has offered to me. I’ve come to realize that the ground I walk everyday in our dynamic, alive Charlottesville bears the remarkable stories of people who dared to chase freedom, people who fought, people who kept the faith in pursuit of the holy. The legacies of our local heroes traverse the bounds of time and I see it all around me: First Baptist on Main, William and Isabella Gibbons Residential Hall, letters from Fairfax Taylor preserved in the Albemarle Historical Society.
But for every legacy of freedom, there runs parallel a legacy of oppression. I sit in ornate Old Cabell Hall as I write this article, a UVA academic building named for a family of particularly racist slave owners and white supremacists. As I wrote about a month ago, the Cabell story intertwines, painfully and ever so intimately, with the story of First Baptist. Thomas Jefferson, the highly venerated ‘king’ of the University of Virginia even today, kept close contact with the Cabells and communicated frequently with the them regarding the trading and sale of slaves. Charlottesville is the site of many an atrocity, from the treatment of African American bodies in anatomical labs, to the construction of academic structures over slave gravesites, to the horrific attacks that took place in August 2017. For many, 2017 came as a moment of great clarity (though it should not have had to come at all): no matter how far the work of Charlottesville legends may have taken us, there is still much, much further to go.
If there is anything I have learned from this project that I know I’ll hold onto, it is that the heavenly promise of freedom can take a variety of forms. I’m reminded of what Pat Edwards told me when I visited First Baptist Church on Main Street: the freedom of the original black members of Charlottesville Baptist Church to form their own church was not just a freedom from, “but a freedom toward”- toward autonomy, agency, education, and worship. Similarly, Lottie Moon fought for her freedom to live out and share the Gospel without barriers for herself or other women- another very particular kind of freedom. All of these are forms, in my opinion, of deeply holy and spiritual liberation; the hand of God present as the Gospel is spread with increasing accessibility and joy. I’m encouraged by these echoes of freedom I can hear when I walk down Charlottesville’s West Main Street.
Going forward, I hope to continue to engage with the story of First Baptist in further research, perhaps culminating in a Distinguished Major thesis next year. Many more twists and turns that I did not have time to cover over just one Summer remain in this story, and I hope to explore them over the course of the next couple years (so rest assured, to those dear readers of mine who have been devoted to my posts, that there is more to come!).
I have many people to thank for this amazing opportunity with the Project on Lived Theology. My particular gratitude goes to Guy Aiken, Charles Marsh, Jessica Seibert, Miranda Burnett, Mike Dickens, Pat Edwards, and Rob Pochek. Without any of these people, this thrilling and invigorating experience would not have been possible.
Learn more about the Emily’s Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship in Lived Theology here.
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
In 1964, the radical Barth found a home in rural Kentucky and pondered the American South – the result was Katallagete. Beyond thrilled to have finally produced a digital version of this astonishing journal. Here you’ll find an intro & sample.
You’ll find both the James Holloway and Will D. Campbell papers at the Special Collections Library at the University of Mississippi. Most of the papers are not (yet) digitized. Dr. Jennifer Ford directs these archives – she’s amazing!
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research initiative, whose mission is to study the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.
Enter some keywords to begin a seach.
