Date: January 16, 2026
This month the Dean’s commentary will feature text by VTS & GTS faculty members writing about what they are currently teaching, reading, or writing about.
Justice is not only a principle, a value, or a virtue. Justice is a practice of building right relationship with neighbors and enemies. Next week a group of 16 students will join my colleague the Rev. D’ana Downing and me for the Justice Praxis Seminar.
The week-long immersion in the practices of advocacy is co-sponsored by the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy (VICPP) and the Saint Nicholas Center for Faith and Justice. Built around VICPP’s annual lobby day, the Day for All People, we’ll spend two days learning the skills, practices, habits, values, and dispositions for advocacy, and then we’ll have the opportunity to practice them. Students will join cohorts of people of faith from across Virginia in meetings with state senators and delegates to advocate for affordable housing, health justice, immigrant rights, and criminal justice reform. Following the lobby day, we’ll spend two more days doing the work of theological and vocational integration at Richmond Hill, a center for prayer and racial healing in the heart of Richmond.
This class forms participants in the skills, knowledge, and dispositions for justice making. Together we’ll learn and practice concrete skills like relational meetings, power analysis, cutting an issue, and building coalitions. Moreover, we’ll analyze policy work drawing on political and moral theory and the theological traditions of the Church. But the end goal, the north star, of the course is that students will increase their capacities for public witness in their vocations, whatever those vocations may be. Please pray with us as we take up this calling – and join us in learning and doing justice!
Kyle Lambelet, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Ethics
Director of the Saint Nicholas Center for Faith and Justice
Virginia Theological Seminary