An Update on the Ecclesial Literature Project and Its Leadership

Since 2006, a centerpiece of the Collegeville Institute has been the Ecclesial Literature Project (ELP). We’ve hosted over 140 writing workshops, in which participants have written sonnets and revised memoirs. They’ve pressed paragraphs into the service of activism. They’ve written with illuminating insight about prayer; they’ve written with charity about long-dead parents; they’ve written with perspicacity about the natural world and about human embodiment; they’ve written with fierceness about injustice; they’ve written Godward and to the world, for secular readers and readers grounded in the church or communities of faith.

Participants in our workshops have won awards for their writing — for example, Sarah L. Sanderson’s The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate was chosen as a Best Book of 2023 by Sojourners magazine, and Charles Halton’s A Human-Shaped God won the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for the best new idea in religion.

But, just as important as those plaudits, participants have left workshops with a renewed sense of vocation, with renewed energy, and with reinvigorated creativity. One workshop participant reported “The writing workshops I took part in helped to remind me to think theologically about everything: work, parenthood, family, leisure, building, writing itself, mental health, community. I think the Collegeville Institute helped deepen my capacity for theological reflection on the everyday.” Another wrote “I am far more willing to articulate theology in my poetry than I once was.”

The ELP is indebted to each workshop leader and participant, but we are also especially indebted to our long-time funder, the Lilly Endowment Inc. Thanks to a recent 1.2 million dollar grant from the Lilly Endowment, we’ve been able to redesign the ELP’s leadership, which will now be directed by partners who have long been essential to our workshops:  Lauren Winner, writer and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke Divinity School, who has taught many of our most popular ELP workshops since 2012, and Carla Durand, who has been a key Collegeville Institute staff member since 2006. 

In our next season, the Ecclesial Literature Project will continue to offer summer workshops at the Collegeville Institute, fall and spring workshops around the country, and online programming. But we will also be creating new offerings such as workshops that help writers keep writing after their workshop concludes, one-day flash workshops in various cities around the country, and topical workshops focusing on, for example, ecology, LGBTQ+ narratives, and the body. We’ll advertise these new (and all) offerings on our website, social media platforms, and monthly e-newsletter as they’re finalized.

As we’ve been visioning our next season of programming, we’ve been thinking about this provocation from Toni Morrison: “Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” Belief’s wide skirt! We at the Ecclesial Literature Project look forward to your joining us, for the first time or again, in such stitching.

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