Named a “best book of the year” in 2021 by both the PBS NewsHour and Publishers Weekly, Read Until You Understand takes its title from a note Griffin’s father, who died when she was nine, wrote her as a child. This book is her love letter to what she has learned from Black writers, orators, and artists from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, Marvin Gaye to Stevie Wonder, Phyllis Wheatley to Toni Morrison. Read More

Josef Sorett is interested in the ironies of secularism–so much so that his next book, The Holy Holy Black, will carry the subtitle The Ironies of an American Secular. In his first book, Spirit in the Dark, he is interested more specifically in how the ostensibly secular and secularizing literature of Black cultural movements in America in the years between the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s was inextricable from religion. Read More

On Tuesday, April 5 at 2:00 p.m. EST, David Bentley Hart will be a guest of the Project on Lived Theology for a Zoom talk on “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Critics.” Read More

Claude Atcho pairs the work of nine seminal 20th-century African American poets and novelists with a theological category for inquiry. In each chapter, Atcho offers not only a close literary reading but also a theological reflection on a primary literary text. Read More

Civil rights historian Tracy E. K’Meyer tells a new story, in To Live Peaceably Together, about the seemingly intractable problem of racial injustice in housing in the United States after WWII. Read More

Watch and listen to many of the lectures from Project on Lived Theology director Charles Marsh’s Fall 2021 seminar, “Theologies of Resistance and Reconciliation: Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, King.” Read More

In 2021, due to the global pandemic, students were unable to undertake the work that usually happens at field sites. As a result, the Project on Lived Theology re-imagined the internship as an Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship in Lived Theology. In this new arrangement, the eight fellows worked closely with faculty mentors from the University of Virginia to design and complete their own intensive projects. Read More

Offering a fresh and stirring reappraisal of Fannie Lou Hamer’s impact on the Civil Rights movement, this book draws on new interviews and fresh archival material to bring to life one of the most iconic figures of the Civil Rights Movement. Read More

Award-winning historian and New York Times best-selling author Keisha N. Blain powerfully blends social commentary, biography, and intellectual history in Until I am Free. This book is essential reading for anyone committed to social justice. The book expands the voice of working-poor and disabled Black woman activist Fannie Lou Hamer, an intellectual icon of the civil rights movement, challenging the reader as we continue to navigate contemporary concerns around race, inequality, and social justice. Read More

As part of his talk, Danté Stewart cited various Black authors and texts that inspired him on his journey. We’ve compiled that list here if you’d like to read along. Read More