Department of Religious Studies
Department of Religious Studies
Charles Marsh headshot

Charles Marsh

Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies; Director, Project on Lived Theology
crm3p@virginia.edu
434-924-6839

Education

  • PhD, University of Virginia
  • MA, University of Virginia
  • MTS, Harvard Divinity School
  • BA, Gordon College

 

Research Interests

  • Modern Christian thought
  • Religion and civil rights
  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • Religion and mental health
  • Lived theology

Teaching

  • Anxiety in Religious and Theological Perspective (seminar open to graduate and undergraduate students)
  • Faith and Doubt in the Modern Age
  • Kingdom of God in America
  • Theology, Self and Society
  • God and the Mystery of the World
  • Theologies of Resistance and Reconciliation: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • The Civil Rights Movements: Theological and Religious Perspectives
  • Readings in Post-Colonial Theology
  • Readings in Lived Theology
  • Theology in the Third Reich (graduate seminar)

Selected Awards

  • 2015 Christianity Today Book Award in History/Biography for Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • 2010 Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow, American Academy in Berlin
  • 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts
  • 1988 Grawemeyer Award in Religion

Selected Publications

  • Evangelical Anxiety. A Memoir (HarperOne, 2022)
  • Can I Get a Witness: Thirteen Peacemakers, Community-Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice, co-edited with Peter Slade and Shea Tuttle (Eerdmans, 2019)
  • Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Knoph, 2014). German translation, Guetersloher Verlagshaus, Bertelsmann.
  • Welcoming Justice God's Movement Toward Beloved Community, co-authored with John M. Perkins (InterVarsity Press, 2009).
  • Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (Oxford, June 2007).
  • The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (Basic Books, 2005).
  • The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South (Basic Books, 2001).
  • God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, 1997).
  • Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford, 1994).

The Project on Lived Theology

  • The Project on Lived Theology is a research initiative housed in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia that explores the social consequences of theological commitments.