Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Donyelle McCray, whose figure is the prominent theologian Howard Thurman.

In your research, what has surprised you about Thurman?

“How overwhelmed he was. His schedule was grueling and he paid for it with his health—especially when he entered his 50s and 60s. Finding serenity is one of the anchors of his teachings yet it seems to have been a rather elusive thing in his own life.”

Can you tell me a story from Thurman’s life that illustrates something crucial about who he is?

“When he was in Colombo during a tour of India, Burma and Ceylon, he had dinner with a British government official. (This was 1936 so this was a colonist.) While at dinner he noticed a fan overhead that was swatting flies away and providing a gentle breeze. As he gazed at the fan, he noticed that it was tied to a pole and the pole to a pulley and the pulley to a rope that extended into another room. Upon rising from dinner, he discovered that the rope was tied to a man’s foot! This man had been operating the fan all along and Howard was disgusted by it. There’s something about invisible, disrespected labor that outraged him. The fact that he was curious enough to follow this benefit of a small breeze to its source says something about how unentitled he was. He was a deeply humble person. Very tender.”

How is spending time with Thurman affecting you?

“He’s made me want to be a different kind of teacher and preacher. In his sermons (and other writings) he gets to such a deep, universal place. As I spend time with his work, I want to spend more time listening to him. I’ve been reading his work for years but I had heard fewer recordings of address. Now, after spending hours and hours listening to him I have a better sense of his voice on the page and otherwise. And I just enjoy the experience and feel nurtured by it.”

What piece of advice can you imagine Thurman offering to the United States or the world today?

“Learn to be tender to one another and to the earth. No soul flourishes in an environment that is constantly harsh and running at too quick of a pace.”

Donyelle McCray is Assistant Professor of Homiletics, Director of Multicultural Ministries, and Associate Director of the preaching program “Deep Calls to Deep” at Virginia Theological Seminary and will join Yale Divinity School this fall as the Assistant Professor of Homiletics. Her primary research interests include homiletics, spirituality, Christian mysticism, and ecclesiology. She is the recipient of the Bell-Woolfall and the James H. Costen North American Doctoral Fellowships.

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice..

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Carlene Bauer, who is writing on social justice champion Dorothy Day.

In your research, what has surprised you about Day?

“What’s been surprising is to overhear her, through her diaries, in her later years, muse on the possibility of writing about what she did not write about in The Long Loneliness and elsewhere.”

If you could call up Day this weekend and invite her out, where would you go and what would you do?

“This sounds very strange, but I think she would like it. There’s a retrospective of the painter Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim in New York City—she was an abstract painter who worked in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Martin, like Day, led one life and then quite another—Martin lived in Manhattan among art stars of the 50s, and then took off for the desert of New Mexico. Martin, like Day, found beauty in the very simplest elements of nature, and painted to communicate hope and joy to others through lines and colors that, working together, create a radiance that could be read as spiritual if one chose. I feel that Day would understand and be intrigued by the biography and the impulse, even if she might not fully embrace the art that resulted.”

How is spending time with Day affecting you?

“As a person, and then an erstwhile person of faith, spending time with Day is making me—and especially, especially now given our president—reconsider how I might work to realize the changes I would like to see in both the city and the country I live in. As a writer, it’s been instructive to read The Long Loneliness again and see how much dramatic tension she creates without admitting to all the facts. In this way the book–which she preferred to call a conversion story and not an autobiography because it did not tell the whole story behind her conversion–is not unlike Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, which does not tell all and yet still makes us turn pages. Also, I keep thinking about what a friend of Day’s said about her—that secretly Dorothy was a poet.”

What piece of advice can you imagine Day offering to the United States or the world today?

“I wouldn’t presume to answer this, but I will say that her writings, whether it’s the journalism from her girl reporter days in 1916 New York City, or her writings from, say 1966, continue to show us a way to look at and combat injustice.”

Carlene Bauer is a writer whose publications include Not That Kind of Girl (2009) and Frances and Bernard (2014). Her work has been published in The Village Voice, Salon, Elle, and The New York Times Magazine. Bauer currently works in and around New York publishing.

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Daniel Rhodes, whose figure is Union leader and labor organizer Cesar Chavez.

In your research, what has surprised you about Chavez?

“One thing that has surprised me about Chavez is how devout he was. Organizing and the cause of the farmworkers really become fused with his Catholic faith, not in a fundamentalist way, but in a way that’s offered a refreshingly new perspective on the place of faith and liturgy as public work.”

Can you tell me a story from Chavez’s life that illustrates something crucial about who he is?

“I have two, though there are many. First, though Chavez was somewhat instinctively the kind of dedicated worker that makes for a good organizer, he was also not by nature a self-confident leader. Apparently, when Chavez first started initiating house meetings, he was completely terrified of leading them. He would often drive around the neighborhood where the meeting was to be held multiple times before he could muster up the courage to go in. Once inside, he would swiftly move to the corner of the room and recoil in silence until he was forced to introduce himself as the head organizer! This story, for me, presents a window into the kingdom figure of Cesar Chavez, whose divine gifts were not surface level charisms but deeply developed and cultivated essential assets located in an unlikely place. In some sense, the union and the movement he helped generate embody this very kind of divine gift to the American church.

Second, in 1963 a man named Manuel Rivera approached Chavez with a complaint about his labor contractor. After questioning the contractor about the wage rate on work he’d already done, Rivera was subsequently fired and his car broke down. When Chavez learned about this, he and his wife Helen took the Rivera family into their tiny home and let them borrow one of their cars until they could afford their own housing and transportation. He would not allow Rivera to pay him anything in return. After disappearing for six months, Rivera returned to town and immediately paid union dues for every month since Chavez had housed him. Rivera become one of the most dedicated early members of the organization and an ardent devotee to Chavez. Three years later in 1966, Rivera would even sacrifice his body for the nascent union, when he was hit by a grower’s truck while standing in a picket line and left permanently crippled. Rivera so admired Chavez and had become so committed to the cause that, even after the accident, he never regretted his involvement. I think this short story displays the way in which Chavez’s own character suffused the farmworker movement.”

What piece of advice can you imagine Chavez offering to the United States or the world today?

“I imagine Chavez would ask us to seriously interrogate our allegiances, especially now with all that has happened this past year. I think in the same breath he’d remind us that its more important to build the relationships necessary to carry the work of justice forward than to develop elaborate schemes and plans for ‘making it happen.’ For him, justice and the aim of the cause could never be abstract or general but it was always first interpersonal and relational. This is why he really viewed the union as a family more than simply a vehicle to gain power or to elevate his status. Winning could not be divorced from love.”

Daniel Rhodes is the faculty coordinator of contextual education at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. As the title of his dissertation for Duke University Divinity School implies, his work focuses on “The History of the Future: Apocalyptic, Community Organizing, and the Theo-politics of Time in an Age of Global Capital.” Rhodes is interested in political theology, broad-based community organizing, capitalism and christianity, globalization, sovereignty and governance, and war and peace studies. His publications include Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community (Baker Books, 2009).

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Grace Yia-Hei Kao, whose figure is Yuri Kochiyama, a life-long activist at the forefront of issues in the black, Latino, Native American and Asian American communities.

When you were first invited to write about Kochiyama, what was your reaction?

“I was excited for two reasons. From time to time I’ve been following what The Project on Lived Theology has been doing and was honored to be asked to participate. When I was asked to write on Kochiyama in particular, I was surprised, as I hadn’t previously put Kochiyama in the category ‘theologian.’  I’ve long been fascinated about Kochiyama’s life, so I was eager to dig more into her life, her sources of inspiration, and her support system through the lens of how she enacted/manifested her faith.”

In your research, what has surprised you about Kochiyama?

“I’ve been most surprised about the slight disconnect between how Kochiyama is remembered (“leading Asian American activist”) and the fact that she took up Asian American issues relatively late in her life, only after campaigning for decades for various other causes, including civil rights (particularly for blacks and latinos/Puerto Ricans), anti-war (Vietnam), and the plight of political prisoners. She was drawn to Asian American issues not so much from a sense of identity politics, but from the logic of what fighting for human dignity and being a part of ‘the struggle’ would require of her.”

How is spending time with Kochiyama affecting you?

“Yuri’s seamless blending of the personal and political is affecting my thoughts on how I’ve elected to order my life. Yuri did things like take her children to marches and protests, turn her Christmas newsletter into a platform to convey her passion for various causes, and open up her home on a regular basis for activists, struggling artists, and college kids to stay sometimes for extended periods of time. In other words, she committed her entire family and all of her resources to ‘the struggle.’ There were, however, some personal costs to doing so (i.e., she expressed regret that her younger children didn’t have ‘typical’ childhoods). As a working mom to two young boys (now ages 7 and 9), I have mostly shielded my work from them and am thinking through what it would be like to live in a more integrated, holistic way.”

What piece of advice can you imagine Kochiyama offering to the United States or the world today?

“Kochiyama would be cautioning the U.S. not to lose its identity and commitment to ‘freedom and justice for all’ in the fight against terrorism, be it through the curtailment of civil liberties for Americans themselves or the new modes of surveillance of warfare that have brought their own forms of destruction and terror to other nations. She would also caution the U.S. against thinking that its enemies are mostly abroad when in fact there are longstanding evils and injustices to be fought at home, such as racism and classism.”

Grace Yia-Hei Kao is the associate professor of ethics at the Claremont School of Theology (CST). She teaches and researches on issues related to human and nonhuman animal rights, religion in the public sphere in the U.S., ecofeminism, and Asian American Christianity. Kao’s publications include Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues (2015) and Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World (2011). Kao’s current projects include a co-edited anthology on a theological exploration of women’s lives.

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Susan Glisson, whose figure is labor and civil rights activist Lucy Randolph Mason.

In your research, what has surprised you about Mason?

“What was surprising was that in talking about her with thoughtful people who are passionate about faith and social justice, I felt a new energy and enthusiasm for thinking about her life. I began to feel as if I was seeing her in a new, more meaningful way.”

Can you tell me a story from Mason’s life that illustrates something crucial about who she is?

“As an organizer for the CIO in the 1930s in the South, Mason visited a newspaper editor who was publicly and vociferously opposed to labor unions. She got a meeting with him in his office and noticed that he had a portrait of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee on his wall.  She began the meeting by sharing that Lee was a cousin of hers and it disarmed and charmed the editor. She left the meeting with his assurance that he would stop attacking the organizing efforts in his newspaper. She was able to find a connection that turned an ‘enemy’ into an ‘unusual ally.'”

How is spending time with Mason affecting you?

“In the vitriol and uncertainty of the 2016 campaign and election, she has brought me comfort as someone who lived through equally chaotic times but who never wavered from her goal of creating humane working conditions and shared prosperity for all.”

What piece of advice can you imagine Mason offering to the United States or the world today?

“I think she would both remind us of our founding principles, especially the separation of church and state and the Bill of Rights (her ancestor George Mason was one of three founders who helped write the Constitution but who refused to sign it because it didn’t outlaw slavery or include the Bill of Rights), as well as caution us about remaining stagnate in our growth as a country, to ask anew every generation who we are leaving out of the promise of the American idea.”

Susan M. Glisson has served as executive director of the Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation since 2002. A native of Evans, Georgia, she earned bachelor’s degrees in religion and history from Mercer University, a master’s degree in Southern studies from the University of Mississippi and a doctorate in American studies from the College of William and Mary. Glisson specializes in the history of race and religion in the United States, especially in the black struggle for freedom. She has numerous publications, has been quoted widely in the media and has supported community projects throughout the state for the Institute since its inception. Susan’s first publication, “Peanut Butter Crisscrosses” appeared in the Warren Baptist Church cookbook when she was 20 years old.

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Therese Lysaught, who is writing on Sister Mary Stella Simpson, a midwife who revolutionized the field of maternal-infant health and family-centered care throughout the twentieth century.

In your research, what has surprised you about Simpson?

“I think the thing that surprised me most was that she was a convert from the Baptist tradition! I do think there were a number of ‘radical’ Christian witnesses from the mid-part of the 20th century (Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, maybe Rose Hawthorne from the previous century) who were also converts, but I never expected a Sister working in Catholic health care to not have been raised Catholic. I was also surprised to learn that she was really the one who pioneered the now common practice of allowing fathers (and family members) to be in the delivery room with birthing mothers.”

Can you tell me a story from Simpson’s life that illustrates something crucial about who she is?

“There’s a story she tells in her letters… she was doing a home visit in the Bayou and the family was without food. And she discovered that the mother was unable to receive a check that she had coming to her (some form of public assistance, I think) because the postmistress wouldn’t give it to her. This was apparently a common Jim Crow sort of practice. So she went down to the post office and in her older nun sort of way threatened the post mistress—and then that practice apparently came to an end. There are a series of stories of her confronting Jim Crow practices in her community. She had no fear!”

How is spending time with Simpson affecting you?

“One of the many great things about her story was that she kept opening herself up to new ministries and new opportunities for discipleship. She goes to the Bayou when she’s 57 and embarks on a completely different kind of work with the poorest of the poor. She’s had me thinking about what sort of chapters may lie ahead for me.”

What piece of advice can you imagine Simpson offering to the United States or the world today?

“If we want to transform the world, the first step is to make sure we see every person as a person—which requires going to them, going to where they live, listening to their story, hearing from them what their needs are, and then working really hard to help them address those needs.  It really only is this sort of radical accompaniment (aka, solidarity) that can make a real difference. And, it’s how we concretely bring God’s grace to the world, person by person.”

Therese Lysaught is a professor and associate director at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Lysaught specializes in Catholic moral theology and health care ethics and consults with health care systems on issues surrounding mission, theology, and ethics. Her publications include Caritas in Communion: Theological Foundations of Catholic Health Care (2014), On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives on Medical Ethics (2007), and Gathered for the Journey: Moral Theology in Catholic Perspective (2007), which received third place honors in ‘Theology’ from the Catholic Press Association.

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Rev. Becca Stevens, whose figure is American social activist, human rights lawyer, and theologian William Stringfellow.

In your research, what has surprised you about Stringfellow?

“I think his prolificness… There was so much to read because he had documented his life’s work for justice thoroughly. I was surprised by some of his encounters, how he remained so consistent in his paradigm.”

Can you tell me a story from Stringfellow’s life that illustrates something crucial about who he is?

“What I love best about Stringfellow is all the stories he told as illustrations of the universal issues of justice he was encountering. I love the story of how he moved into a tenement apartment and despite the roaches and filth, he was able to make a home for more than a year there. It reminds me of how fearless he was and how he lived the talk so gracefully.”

If you could call up Stringfellow this weekend and invite him out, where would you go and what would you do?

“I would take him to the Thistle Stop Cafe, where women who are survivors of trafficking, addiction, and prostitution run a beautiful restaurant and support the community of Thistle Farms. We would sip justice tea, eat whatever they served and I would ask him questions about grief, justice, and love.”

How is spending time with Stringfellow affecting you?

“I started dreaming of Stringfellow. In my dream I wiped tears from his eyes with the old lamb’s wool priests use to anoint those suffering. I have been affected by Stringfellow in my subconscious and been inspired to continue to the work I have been given all the days of my life.”

Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest and founder of Magdalene, a residential community of women who have survived institutional and drug abuse. She is a prolific writer and her works include The Way of Tea and Justice: Rescuing the World’s Favorite Beverage from It’s Violent History (Hachette, 2014) and Letters from the Farm: A Simple Path for a Deeper Spiritual Life (Church Publishing, 2015). She has been inducted into the Tennessee Women’s Hall of Fame and she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the South.

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.

Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2016/2017 Author Series

The 2016-2017 SILT celebrates scholars, activists, laypeople, and religious leaders whose lived theologies produced and inspired social justice in the United States, and will produce a single volume entitled Can I Get a Witness? Thirteen Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice.

This news series, Can I Get a Witness? The Interviews, features conversations with the Witness participants to highlight how each author is being changed and challenged by the historical figure they are working to illumine. This week’s headliner is Ralph Eubanks, writing on gospel singer and civil rights activist Mahalia Jackson.

When you were first invited to write about Jackson, what was your reaction?

“The first thing I thought about was how much I listened to Jackson growing up. Many Sunday mornings, my father would play her album… When he listened to ‘In the Upper Room,’ he was always dressed in a dark suit with a dark skinny tie and he would stand over the record listening to it with his head bowed. As I studied Jackson’s singing style and learned what she tried to evoke for an audience when she performed, I realized my father used Jackson’s music to center himself in prayer before church. It’s something I had never thought of before.”

In your research, what has surprised you about Jackson?

“As I began my writing about Jackson, I studied her performing style—I see her performances as the major primary source on Jackson as a figure of radical Christian witness—and noticed how she became another person on the stage in the course of a performance.  There was something happening, but I was not sure what it was. In shots of the audience, you can see people absorbed by the power of her performance, both from her voice and the emotion she communicates to her audience. Over the summer I went to the Chicago Historical Society to listen to a 1953 interview Jackson did with Studs Terkel, who many consider the father of modern oral history. In that interview, the first question Terkel asks is, ‘what goes on inside you when you sing?’ Jackson responded by saying ‘I truly have a divine feeling inside me. I don’t seem to be myself, I am transformed from Mahalia Jackson into something divine.’ Then it hit me: Jackson’s performances were transformative moments for her, the moments when she felt a connection with the divine and was at one with God.”

Can you tell me a story from Jackson’s life that illustrates something crucial about who she is?

“Five years after her public announcement of support for civil rights in the Berkshires, the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy asked Jackson to perform in Montgomery, Alabama, at a symposium on the politics of social change. The event also honored those who had kept the bus boycott going. When Abernathy asked Jackson what her fee would be, her response was ‘I aint comin’ to Montgomery to make no money off them walkin’ folks!’ Jackson performed in Montgomery for free and for the benefit of the ‘walkin’ folks’ rather than charging them.”

How is spending time with Jackson affecting you?

“Writing about Jackson is reconnecting me with part of my past and my childhood and in a good way. I even find myself driving around listening to Jackson… When I listen to ‘Move on Up a Little Higher,’ I know I am doing what Jackson wanted, since she said, ‘I really feel it is wonderful for people of the world to stop and listen to a sacred record. The Lord commanded us to go in the highways and hedges and compel men to come to God.’ And I have listened to Jackson on the highways and hedges.”

Ralph Eubanks is the Eudora Welty Professor of Southern Studies at Millsaps College. Eubanks has contributed articles to the Washington Post Outlook and Style sections, the Chicago Tribune, Preservation, and National Public Radio. His publications include The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South (2009) and Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past (2003), which Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley named as one of the best nonfiction books of 2003. Eubanks is a recipient of a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a fellow at the New America Foundation.

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.