Community action

Prospect Avenue’s Section 8 housing project, on Charlottesville’s south side, is home to roughly 400 families, most of them single-parent, African-American households. About 70 percent of the residents are among the “working poor,” and 30 percent draw heavily from public assistance. The neighborhood seems a world away from U.Va., but for the past two years, John Kiess (Political and Social Thought ’01) has made Prospect his home.

Since he graduated two years ago, Kiess has worked at Charlottesville Abundant Life Ministries, a faith-based outreach ministry in the Prospect neighborhood where he began volunteering as a fourth-year student. He has coordinated a life skills program for fifth- through eighth-grade boys and worked with neighborhood residents to establish a neighborhood association. And he’s spent a lot of time just hanging out.

“Living in the neighborhood has allowed many more encounters with the residents. Shared meals, people stopping by and checking up, kids coming over all the time — these opportunities are a lot more natural because I live there.”

Kiess started college like perhaps many of his classmates, consumed with classes and social life and disconnected from the world outside the University. But his work in an orphanage in the Philippines the summer after his second year “blew everything open” for him. “The bare reality of conditions there was eye-opening,” he said.

His fourth year, Kiess discovered Charles Marsh, associate professor of religious studies. Marsh directs the Project on Lived Theology, which studies the nexus between faith and social justice.

“His whole outlook — connecting theology to practice — transformed my thinking. He introduced me to the [Dietrich] Bonhoeffers of the world, the [Martin Luther] Kings of the world, as a source of inquiry and embodiment.”

Marsh also introduced him to the Prospect neighborhood and Abundant Life, which has turned out to be a pivotal part of his education.

“I went three years at U.Va. thinking it was possible to be a learner cut off from the realities of the community the University inhabits,” Kiess said. “Working at Abundant Life my fourth year was a way to bridge the gap between the academic and the practical.”

Now Kiess, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa as an Echols scholar, is headed to Northern Ireland to study a different kind of social problem. As U.Va.’s first recipient of the prestigious George J. Mitchell Scholarship, created in 1998 as a gift from the Irish government in honor of Sen. Mitchell’s contribution to the peace process in Northern Ireland, Kiess will earn a master’s degree in comparative ethnic conflict at Queen’s University in Belfast.

“It’s a tremendous honor to have won this scholarship,” he said. “That they selected me is a confirmation of the relevancy of a faith perspective in the public sphere.”

Following his one-year master’s program, Kiess plans to study theology at Cambridge University. And after that, he may pursue ordination or community activism. But whatever he does, he knows that it will combine his Christian faith with community engagement.

Kiess sees his faith as vital to his work. But at times he grows frustrated with some evangelicals’ oblivion to social-welfare problems in their haste to save souls. “Evangelism and social justice are intimately tied together. There really can’t be one without the other.”