Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tenn.
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Lynchburg Is More Than Liberty U
Meet people building diverse communities in Falwell’s hub of deeply conservative white evangelicalism.
NESTLED IN THE foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city of Lynchburg, Va., is best known as the home of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. As the city’s largest employer, Liberty wields extensive influence: Its campus is home to more than 16,000 in-person students in a city of around 80,000. (Liberty’s online programs bring its total enrollment up to a staggering 140,000 students, making the fundamentalist Christian school one of the country’s largest institutions of higher education.)
Christian televangelist and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell Sr., born in Lynchburg, launched the Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967 as a segregation academy, followed by an early version of Liberty University in 1971. Falwell’s organizations and television presence formed generations of Christians through fundamentalist values and political organizing. After Falwell died in 2007, his son and successor Jerry Falwell Jr. sought to expand Liberty’s political influence. Falwell Jr.’s personal endorsement of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign helped swing the evangelical electorate; in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Liberty University was listed on the Project 2025 advisory board. For more than 50 years, Liberty has solidified its place as a powerful culture shaper, and Lynchburg has become the geographic epicenter of a major branch of white conservative evangelicalism in the United States.
‘With This Inheritance, I Was Getting Too Much’
CALLIE WALKER GREW up in central Virginia, where her father farmed cattle on land he’d purchased in the 1960s. Walker, 56, with bright blue eyes and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, doesn’t know how much land her father originally owned. “It was certainly hundreds of acres,” she said, “and it may have been thousands.”
He spent 30 years paying it off, Walker told me, and succeeded, largely, by selling off a parcel of land here or there to pay the bills. When Walker’s father died in 2014, at 91, he left his three children portions of the remaining acreage; Walker’s inheritance — green, rolling farmland unfurling on either side of a small country road — totaled 134 acres.
Walker attended Princeton Theological Seminary and spent years living communally and working for racial justice. She had known since the 1990s that she wanted to use the property she would one day inherit for some kind of intentional community.
By January 2020, Walker’s intentions for the land clarified: She wanted to give it away.
I’m Just Not Ready to Give Up on Resurrection
What the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker teaches us about belief and unbelief.
Illustration by Chris Buzelli
The ivory-billed woodpecker has been called “Lord God Bird,” for its massive size; “Grail Bird,” for the fervor with which people seek it; and “Ghost Bird,” for the way it hovers on the murky edge between existence and extinction. But Cornell ornithologist Tim Gallagher, author of The Grail Bird, calls it “Lazarus Bird,” after the story of Jesus resurrecting his friend Lazarus four days after he died.
Growing up in the church, I was never sure what to do with resurrection. My father’s faith didn’t emphasize the idea that Christ died for my salvation, or that Christ’s believers would be raised from the dead, but these beliefs were everywhere—in the hymns we sang in the various United Methodist churches where he served as pastor, in the creed we recited every Sunday: I believe in ... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
From my seat in the pews, the promise of everlasting life rang hollow. I did not expect decomposed bodies of believers would one day be reconstituted, nor did I see this as desirable for myself or the people I loved. But metaphorical interpretations of resurrection also fell short: A body raised symbolically from the dead is still very much dead. In graduate school, I read about Thomas Jefferson’s excision of miracles, including the resurrection, from his Bible with a sense of relief. The stories I couldn’t believe literally or understand figuratively, could be simply cut away. But as I’ve grown older, these stories resist neat excision. To dismiss resurrection entirely feels increasingly fraught: Why did faith matter if it did not transform real bodies, real lives, here on earth?