Happy Friday! We have two Summer Scholars to introduce today!
First up, we have Lillian Pingle. Lillian is a junior from Waynesboro, Virginia, who is majoring in Sociology and minoring in Religious Studies. She is in the Honors Program, on HrnsPAG, and the president of RC Lutherans. She also has two jobs, one as a tutor at the Roanoke College Writing Center and the other as a Wellness Peer Educator with Student Health and Counseling. She plans to graduate from Roanoke College in December of 2022 and go on to get her Master’s in Religion starting in the Fall of 2023.
Lillian is working with Dr. Trexler on the project “The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America: The Whitest Christian Denomination in the United States.” Here is her description of her work: This project examines why the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has the highest percentage of white people of any other Christian denomination in the United States (Lipka 2015). I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with pastors in the Virginia Synod to discuss why they believe that the ELCA is the whitest Christian denomination in the United States, and how they think racial diversity and justice might occur in the denomination. After these interviews, I will survey the laity in those pastors’ congregations to assess lay conceptions of racial justice in the ELCA.