9 Illuminating Memoirs by UVA Alumni

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By Sam Grossman

With elements of traditional memoir, biography and lyric essay, these nonfiction works chronicle some of the diverse experiences of the UVA alumni community.

In his newest book, UVA religious studies professor Charles Marsh explores the ways in which his Christian upbringing affected his mental health. For years he suffered from panic attacks and depression, but “we did not do therapy—my family, my particular evangelical coterie,” he writes. With vulnerability and humor, Marsh explains how he finally sought mental health treatment. Through years of Freudian psychoanalysis, he slowly sheds the secrecy and shame he was “primed for,” becoming “freer, and somehow more unified.” In the end, Marsh remains devoted to Christianity, with the understanding that it’s “much larger and more encompassing than the churches of my childhood.”

See the full 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.

On Lived Theology: AAR’s Reading Religion Reviews PLT Publication

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Lived Theology: New Perspectives on Method, Style, and Pedagogy; Charles Marsh; Sarah Azaransky; Peter SladeNewly Released Book Receives Praise

Lived Theology: New Perspectives on Method, Style, and Pedagogy contains the work of an emerging generation of theologians and scholars who pursue research, teaching, and writing as a form of public responsibility motivated by the conviction that theological ideas aspire in their inner logic toward social expression. Written as a two-year collaboration here at the Project on Lived Theology, this volume offers a series of illustrations and styles that distinguish Lived Theology in the broader conversation with other major approaches to the religious interpretation of embodied life.

Reading Religion, the newly launched book review site of the American Academy of Religion, recently reviewed the book, recognizing the work’s unique and valuable contribution to today’s theological inquiry:

“…this diverse work should prove engaging for any theologian interested in practices. It coheres through shared conviction that the lived realities of faith constitute a rich and primary focal point for theological inquiry. Together, the authors illustrate and explore this conviction well… Their diversity provides a broad and engaging introduction to the work of lived theology while gesturing toward a much larger conversation.”

To read the review in its entirety, click here. Find more details on the Lived Theology publication here.

Publication contributors include Sarah Azaransky, Jacqueline Bussie, David Dark, Susan Glisson, John de Gruchy, Susan R. Holman, Lori Brandt Hale, Willis Jenkins, Willie James Jennings, John Kiess, Jennifer M. McBride, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Charles Marsh, Peter Slade, and Ted Smith.

For more details about the Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017: Can I Get A Witness? initiative, click here. We also post updates online using #SILT. To get these and other news updates, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @LivedTheology. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Review of Born of Conviction

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Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society, Joseph T. ReiffThe Alternative Witness of “the Twenty-Eight” to 1960’s Segregation

The Southern white church of the civil rights era is remembered for its intense resistance to change. Yet twenty-eight white Methodist pastors published a statement entitled “Born of Conviction” advocating an alternative witness to the segregationist party line and causing a serious rift in the public unanimity of Mississippi white resistance. Joseph T. Reiff’s Born of Conviction tells their story, examining their theologies and personal convictions, experiences before, during, and after the publication, and overall impact on the racial climate in Mississippi’s closed society.

In his review of Born of Conviction, Colin B. Chapell of the University of Memphis writes:

“This narrative moves effortlessly between an individual and institutional focus, a great strength of the book. Readers will walk away understanding the issues facing the Methodist Church in the 1960s, while simultaneously seeing how individuals fit into that larger picture. There are occasional moments when individual biographies of pastors blur the larger story, and extended vignettes may distract some readers. However, in detailing the lives of so many individuals, Reiff presents a balanced picture of the power of a principled, faith-based stand…

Born of Conviction is a nuanced, mature study that takes the faith stances of both progressives and segregationists seriously.”

For more information on Reiff’s book, click here. To read Chapell’s full review, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more resources from our Fellow Travelers, click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

On the Lived Theology Reading List: A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed

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A Body Broken, A Body BetrayedAddressing the wounds of race and privilege that continue to diminish the life of the church

In their new book, A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White-Dominant Churches, theologians and Presbyterian ministers Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Marcia Mount Shoop emphasize the need to surface the dynamics of whiteness especially in contexts where whites have had the most power in America, such as mainline Protestant churches. Using Eucharist as a template for both the church’s blindness and for Christ’s redemptive capacity, this book invites faith communities, especially white-dominant churches, into new ways of remembering what it means to be the body of Christ.

In his review of A Body Broken, A Body Betrayed, PLT Contributor Kristopher Norris writes:

For McClintock Fulkerson and Mount Shoop, the Eucharist often becomes a practice disconnected from the everyday realities of the lives of practitioners, and in this abstract and ritualized form could actually foster racial solidarity among whites. Instead of opening congregations up to the ‘other,’ the Eucharist often “creates sacrament out of sameness” and insulates churches from the unacknowledged wounds of our colorblind memories. It runs the risk of functioning as an appreciate remembrance of a past act rather than a transformative practice with consequences for how we live in the present.

The authors propose viewing the Eucharist with a “flexible memory” that listens to dissonant stories. This requires the telling of contemporary stories of brokenness and betrayal as part of the liturgy, which may open us up to new ways of seeing our own past and present. In this way the church community can cultivate the skills to notice and name habits and systems that often go unacknowledged and inflict racialized harm. Eucharist, practiced in this way, can disrupt our own self-protective assumptions and attend to God’s presence with those who suffer in the world. It may even change the way we read our own history and understand the abuses we have perpetuated while calling ourselves the Body of Christ.

For more information on McClintock Fulkerson and Mount Shoop’s book, click here. To read Norris’s full review, click here.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads.

On the Lived Theology Reading List: The Third Reconstruction

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third reconstructionA call to action to a moral revolution

The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement is Rev. Dr. William J. Barber’s memoir of the 2013 grassroots movement in North Carolina that protested restrictions on voting and demanded a make-over of the state government. This memoir was written along with PLT Contributor Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and is set to come out in January 2016.

In his review of The Third Construction, PLT Contributor Peter Hartwig writes:

Barber tells the tales of his father, who moved his family back to North Carolina to fight for desegregation in the school system; of his saintly grandmother, who taught him not to help folk, but to ‘hope’ folk, to bring hope into their lives; of miraculous healings and angelic visitation. But it quickly becomes clear that the preacher has more to share than just memoirs. Through Wilson-Hartgrove’s prose, the Reverend Barber recounts not only his own biography, but also the grand and multi-layered story in which he has spent his life. It is the story of fusion politics, a coalition of unlikely friends all laboring for social justice in North Carolina; the latest chapter in the long story of liberating faith in the South; the birth-story of a grassroots moral revolution that is spreading across the entire nation. It is the story of the Gospel saving the soul of America.

For more information on Rev. Barber’s book, click here. To read Hartwig’s full review, click here.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads.

“Marsh brings readers closer to Bonhoeffer than any prior biographer writing in English”: John G. Turner reviews Strange Glory in Christian Century

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John Turner’s Christian Century review of Charles Marsh’s newest book Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was released today. From the review:

Charles Marsh has written a moving, melancholy portrait of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor executed in a concentration camp two months before World War II ended in Europe.

With both empathy and a critical eye, Marsh traces Bonhoeffer’s mercurial existence… Strange Glory is a biographical triumph. Bonhoeffer was prolific but not given to introspection, so he is psychologically elusive. Through generous quotations from sermons, books, and especially letters, Marsh brings readers closer to Bonhoeffer than any prior biographer writing in English.

To read the full text of the review, click here.
For more on Strange Glory, click here.
For updates on book related events, click here.

Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was published on April 29, 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf. Charles Marsh, director of the Project on Lived Theology, powerfully brings to life the struggles, triumphs, and transformations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—German pastor, dissident, and conspirator in the resistance against Hitler and the Nazi party. No other theologian has crossed as many boundaries as Bonhoeffer while remaining exuberantly, generously Christian.