Samford hosts 21st Lilly Fellows Program annual meeting

Historian and religious studies professor Charles Marsh told educators at a national conference of church-related institutions at Samford University that German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer embraced the idea of social ministries while studying in the United States during 1930–31.

Speaking at the opening plenary session of the 21st annual meeting of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, Marsh noted that Bonhoeffer arrived as a “straight-arrow academic” with little respect for American intellectual and religious life, and “left with a transformed perspective on social engagement, faith and historical responsibility.”

Almost 200 educators and administrators from the 96 universities that are part of the Lilly National Program attended the Oct. 21–23 event.

Marsh, director of The Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, said Bonhoeffer learned “to see the great events of world history from below … in short from the perspective of the suffering” after taking a course in “Church and Community” at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Upon his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer became involved in social ministries in Berlin, said Marsh. He began opposing the Nazi regime during the 1930s, and ultimately was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 and executed in 1945.

The Lilly Conference theme of “Reconciliation in History, Literature, and Music” examined aspects of the Civil Rights Movement and social action. Marsh is the author of several books on Civil Rights history and two on Bonhoeffer.

Also leading plenary sessions were literature and folklore scholar Trudier Harris, the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who spoke on “The Terrible Pangs of Compromise: Racial Reconciliation in African American Literature,” and vocal studies professor Rosephanye Dunn-Powell of Auburn University, who provided visiting educators with an introduction to African-American church music at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.  (SU)