On Wednesday, Nov. 17 at 3:30 p.m. EST, writer and speaker Danté Stewart will be a guest of the Project on Lived Theology to talk about his new book, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle (Convergent, 2021). Shoutin’ in the Fire is a coming-of-age memoir on being Black and learning to love in a loveless world.
Stewart, whose work focuses on the areas of race, religion, and politics, has been featured on CNN and in the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Comment, and elsewhere. His recent essay, “How I learned that Jesus is Black” has inspired exuberant public debate weeks since it appeared in the New York Times on Monday, October 18.
“We are delighted to welcome this dazzling young writer-activist to UVA and look forward to a generative exchange on matters that remain urgent, persistent, and confounding to us all,” says Charles Marsh, Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies and the director of the Project on Lived Theology.
In Shoutin’ in the Fire, Danté Stewart gives breathtaking language to his reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy – both the kind that hangs over our country and the kind that is internalized on a molecular level. Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance – and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world.
“Only once in a lifetime do we come across a writer like Danté Stewart, so young and yet so masterful with the pen. This work is a thing to make dungeons shake and hearts thunder.” (Robert Jones, Jr., New York Times best-selling author of The Prophets).
Stewart received his BA in sociology from Clemson University and is currently studying at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.
The Nov. 17 event, which is free and open to the public, can be watched on Zoom at https://tinyurl.com/joinPLT, Passcode: 546359. A question-and-answer session will follow the lecture.
The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia is a research community funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., commissioned to understand the social consequences of theological ideas for the sake of a more just and compassionate world.