In his new biography Frederick Douglass: America’s Prophet, historian D.H. Dilbeck seeks to focus on an underexplored aspect of the prominent abolitionist’s life, his Christian faith. Dilbeck- who previously wrote A More Civil War- portrays Douglass’ religious life as complex, combining both youthful evangelicalism and a growing hostility towards churches complicity with slavery and bigotry. Read More

In Langston’s Salvation, Princeton University Religion scholar Wallace D. Best offers an important evaluation of the place of religion in the work of the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. Langston’s Salvation is not strictly a religious biography of Hughes, but rather a study of how Hughes engaged with religion as an intellectual and how he thought theologically. Read More

In Accidental Theologians, Religious Studies professor Elizabeth A. Dreyer examines the theology and lives of Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux. These four are the only women out of the thirty-five people who have been declared “Doctors of the Church” by the Roman Catholic Church, a title that requires theological acumen, holy living and recognition by the Pope. Read More

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