Like many of our friends and neighbors, near and far, we at the Project on Lived Theology experienced the events of August 11 and 12, 2017, with horror, grief, anger, and determination. In the days, weeks, and months following those awful days, we were heartened to hear so many voices invoking theology in their reckonings with our national demons of racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. What follows is a collection of some of those voices. Read More

Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan has long been an enigmatic figure. Perhaps the most controversial period in his career was between 1979 and 1981, when the Jewish-born Dylan began espousing Christianity. In Trouble in Mind Clinton Heylin – Dylan’s most meticulous biographer- argues that this period was one of the most creative and generative of Dylan’s life. Read More

There are many histories that focus on the grand sweep of the civil rights movement. Historian S. Jonathan Bass’s He Calls Me By Lightning offers an intimate scope, examining on one case that shows the brutality of the legal system in the Jim Crow south. Bass’s book focuses on Caliph Washington, a black man who was attacked by a white police officer in a small Alabama town. Read More

Just a few weeks after meeting the Prophet with a Pencil scholars and theologians to share her story of being jailed and persecuted for freedom, civil rights foot soldier Betty “BJ Love” King passed away. Read More

In A More Beautiful and Terrible History, political science professor Jeanne Theoharis aims to bust myths about the civil rights movement. According to Theoharis, the civil rights movement in popular memory has wrongly become “A narrative of dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, the story was narrowed to buses and lunch counters and southern redneck violence.” Read More

In Christian: The Politics of a Word in America, historian Matthew Bowman traces how the term “Christian” had numerous meanings to different groups in the United States. Bowman examines how the rise of Western Civilization Courses at Columbia University in the early twentieth century underpinned attempts to connected Christianity and American democracy, while the African-American faculty of Howard University worked out how Christianity fit into challenging white supremacy. Read More

Historian Julian Maxwell Hayter starts out The Dream is Lost by observing that Richmond, Virginia is “seldom central to the narrative of the American civil rights movement”, but his study of race and politics in that city from the 1950s to the 1980s proceeds to make a persuasive case for why it should be. Read More

On June 8-9, 2018, a group of scholars gathered in Birmingham, Alabama for two days of discussions, dialogue, and support. The assembly’s work will produce a single volume entitled Prophet with a Pencil: The Continuing Significance of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail which will be released by Wifp and Stock in 2019. The meeting focused on the theological significance of King’s letter. Read More

Starting in the 1940s, Clarence Jordan tried to put Christianity into practice in the South, which was flouting segregation and inequality. Despite having a PhD, he made an impact not by being a lofty intellectual but by founding Koinonia- an interracial Christian farming community- and serving as a formative influence on Habit for Humanity. Read More

On April 24, the Project on Lived Theology welcomed Patricia Hampl to UVA Grounds to speak on her new book, The Art of the Wasted Day (Viking, 2018). Hampl spoke in Project director Charles Marsh’s afternoon class about nonfiction personal narrative writing, and in the early evening, she read from her book at the Bonhoeffer House. Both events were open to the public. Read More