Neal A. Lester, Foundation Professor of English and founding director of Project Humanities at Arizona State University, has been awarded a $25,000 Teacher-Scholar Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.

The one-year award will support Lester’s research exploring Black American spirituality as a living system of worship, fortitude and communal care.

This grant is a collaboration with co-principal investigators Isis Pickens of Pickens Solutions LLC; Randy Nelson, an independent scholar; and Mount Trial Primitive Baptist Church of Wakulla County, Florida.

Lester’s project, “REVIVAL: In Celebration of a Black American Spiritual Metaverse,” documents and interprets diverse traditions, practices, testimonies, music, artifacts and worship acts that shape Black American spiritual communities. Through oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, participatory storytelling and digital archiving, “REVIVAL” examines how Black American spiritual worship practices nurture resilience, joy, justice and community care within and beyond the church.

“Research opportunities always contribute to my teaching,” said Lester. “As I discover more, my students both inside and outside of the academy also benefit. As an educator committed to continual scholarship, I see my teaching and research as fundamentally interconnected. This research opportunity will inform my pedagogy about spirituality that moves across genres and formats. Sermons, gospel songs, prayers and testimonials, church performances and rhetorical flourishes are foundational to many literary texts I teach, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye.’”

The project research is an institutional collaboration with Mount Trial Primitive Baptist Church, a historically Black congregation in Florida founded by formerly enslaved Africans and Black Indigenous peoples. The church grounds, cemetery and surrounding Buckhorn community provide a meaningful setting for examining how faith traditions adapt, endure and transform in private and public worship contexts.

Over the grant period, Lester and his research team will:

• Collect oral histories, worship artifacts, sermons and soundscapes.
• Engage intergenerational church members in story circles and listening sessions.
• Build a participatory digital archive.
• Develop frameworks for teaching spirituality across theology, humanities and cultural studies.
• Share findings through community presentations, academic lectures and public-facing resources.

The project advances Lester’s broader scholarly work at the intersections of literature, culture, spirituality, pedagogy and justice, and contributes new models for community-engaged theological research and understanding.

Following completion of the grant, the investigators will share their findings through conference presentations, publications, collaborative reports with partner churches and institutions. A public digital platform will be designed to preserve and expand access to the collected materials. This program is made possible through a Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with funds provided by Lilly Endowment Inc.