Ecclesial Literature Project
Words Making Worlds: The Ecclesial Literature Project is a multifaceted program designed to encourage the writing and disciplined reading of serious literature that engages matters of the spirit. The project aims to help congregations again become the kinds of intellectual centers that informed and benefited from writers as varied as Thomas à Kempis, John Milton, John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene, Shusako Endo, and Flannery O'Connor, among many others. These writers addressed matters of faith both directly and indirectly, and from perspectives that ranged from skepticism to apologia. Despite their great differences, their work holds this in common: it has appealed to broad audiences and helped general readers attend more carefully to spiritual realities.
Writers like Milton and O'Connor represent a literary genius both rare and unique; yet, throughout its history the church has also been fed by unnumbered writers, many of them pastors, whose writing has had a more local, yet no less significant, impact. The Collegeville Institute hopes to provide time, space, and opportunity for new cohorts of writers who have the inclination and ability to serve the church through the written word. Their contributions can take various forms--from a poem for the ages to a compelling pastoral letter that meets the particular needs of a particular congregation at a particular time.
The Ecclesial Literature Project, funded by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., will convene writing and reading groups at the Institute during the summer months; award prizes for exemplary works of religious literature; and, through its writer-in residence program, bring noted writers to the Institute and Saint John's campus for varying lengths of time during the academic year. The Institute will also sponsor occasional lectures, readings, and panel discussions about matters that relate to a broad theological literacy within church and society.
The Institute is blessed with resources that offer writers the time, encouragement, and instruction necessary to inspire and support their work. It provides fine residential facilities, generous gathering and workspaces, a retreat-like environment, access to the full resources of a major liberal arts university, and a connection to the deep heritage of the Benedictine tradition. It has an established record of encouraging the production of both academic and ecclesial literature, and an ecumenical commitment to furthering the purposes of the varied parts of the body of Christ. Writers such as Kathleen Norris, Henri Nouwen, Don Saliers, Lewis Smedes, Parker Palmer, and Joan Chittister have already produced solid works of ecclesial literature during their stays at the Institute. Through their own successfully published works, these writers have demonstrated that the Institute is a place where writers from various denominational and vocational backgrounds can convene, converse, worship, pray, behold God's handiwork in the natural world, and work hard.
Through the Ecclesial Literature Project the Institute hopes to provide a place where pastors, academics, and laypersons-anyone interested in writing that illumines and feeds the religious life-can live together to write, read one another's work, and talk about that work. The Institute hopes to serve as an incubator for all sorts of ecclesial writing-fiction, drama, poetry, theological essays, memoir, children's books, biography, history-and offer instruction in the skills of writing. By helping to generate vital, contemporary forms of writing for people of faith, the Institute seeks to contribute to the vitality of faith within congregations.