Assembly Worship

Dr. Charles March Sermon: “Let Us Now Praise the Peculiar People!” Charles Marsh is the Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and director of the Project on Lived Theology. A scholar of modern Christian thought, Marsh has written widely on the intersections of faith, social ethics, and public life, with particular attention to the lived textures of religious experience. His biography Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014) was shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award and received the Christianity Today Book Award. The book offers an intimate and deeply researched portrait of the German theologian and resistor, drawing on extensive archival discoveries. Marsh’s earlier work God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (1997) won the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion and remains a touchstone in studies of religion and the American freedom struggle. Marsh has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin. He has also served as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. In both his scholarship and his leadership of the Project on Lived Theology, Marsh explores how religious conviction shapes moral imagination, civic courage, and social transformation. His recent work includes Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir (HarperOne, 2022), which weaves theological reflection with personal narrative to consider the demands—and promises—of telling the truth about one’s life. Across theology, biography, and cultural criticism, Marsh’s writing attends to the concrete, lived dimensions of faith in history and in our own unsettled times.