In Moral Combat, historian R. Marie Griffith studies the history of the views that many American Christians have on divisive political issues such as Gay marriage, transgender rights, and birth control–sex. Griffith argues that these modern disagreements were started in the 1920s, when liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Read More

On September 26 and 27, Charles Marsh will deliver three lectures at the School of Theology at Sewanee University as the 2018 DuBose Lecturer. The three lectures will explore the theme “Can I Get a Witness? Explorations in an Amen.” Read More

In this new biography, historian Marcus Rediker, author of Many-Headed Hydra and Slave Ship, documents one of the most idiosyncratic figures in eighteenth-century America, abolitionist Benjamin Lay. Lay was a Quaker dwarf who lived in a cave-like home and was known for his dramatic protests against slavery, once kidnapping the child of a slaveholder to demonstrate the evil of separating families. Read More

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, this new collection offers a reappraisal of King’s political thought and legacy. Of particular contemporary relevance is the consideration of King’s views on nonviolence and the strategies that made it an effective force for social change. Read More

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