The review of the Ivy League Congress on Faith and Action is now online:  The Ivy League Christian Observer (Summer 2011). Their report on the Congress starts on page 12: "Hands raised, bodies swayed, voices lifted in song. At the Ivy League Congress on Faith and Action in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 380 students gathered to seek and praise the One who could not be seen, but whose presence was palpably felt."

I was part of a panel with Tim Tsang (Moogist) and G. James Daichendt on Arts and Entertainment at the Ivy League Congress on Faith and Action hosted by members at Harvard University.

Christian Union, the organization that is hosting this Congress has 260 students at Princeton University, making it the largest membership of any student organization on campus. Harvard has beaten their growth rate and Yale is beating Harvard. They have a 24/7 prayer room and almost all of the hours are covered. Many of the students fast on a regular basis. The president of Christian Union, Matt Bennett, says the exponential growth and spiritual vitality feel like descriptions of the Great Awakenings.

 Half of the top 150 influencers in the US are from an Ivy League school.

I've never felt so optimistic about the future of the world!

Here's my talk:

https://archive.org/embed/RichSwingleOnArtsAndEntertainmentAtTheIvyLeagueCongressOnFaithAnd

"Answering the Curtain Call", which I wrote in 2002 

"Teaching Kids to Kill" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue (Engaging Culture) by Dale Savidge and Todd E. Johnson

Here are links to organizations I plan to mention:

The Christopher Awards 

Christians in Theatre Arts: CITA.org 

MasterWorks Festival: RichDrama.com/MWF

MasterMedia: MasterMediaIntl.org 

Christians in Visual Arts: CIVA.org 

Here are plays I plan to mention:

Screwtape Letters 

Freud's Last Session  

  My own plays

  Reflections in the Light reviews

Here are films I'm planning to mention:

The Ten Commandments

Ben Hur 

The Passion of the Christ

Fireproof

The Grace Card

My upcoming films 

Soul Surfer 

Mary Dyer being led to her hanging. Nineteenth c. artist unknown.

When I was in seminary I had a Church History class with Dr. Richard Lovelace, a student of Yale College, Westminster Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. He gave us a list of Church history figures, and we were to write a paper on one of them. I asked if I could instead write a play on Mary Dyer, a Quaker martyr. He granted me permission, and it became my first feature-length play. Act One ends with her neck in the noose as she watches two of her colleagues swing. The second act culminates in her own hanging on the Boston Common on June 1, 1660. Their crime was worshipping Jesus Christ in a manner that seemed heretical to the Puritans of Massachusetts.

The play has never been produced, but a reading of it was done at my alma mater, George Fox University, in 1999 when I was named alumnus of the year.

While looking for a bio on Dr. Lovelace (which I never found), I came across a great interview on revival with him by Christian Book Distributors: An Interview with Author Richard F. Lovelace on Revival.

Right now, we are sitting here looking at I don't know how much of the planet under the veil of Islam, the Moslems, that’s where I would expect Spiritual Awakening to spread to. If you are going to say that the Gospel is preached to every nation, I would say a powerful lot of Website, internet, or radio and TV communication would have to take place in the Moslem area. Also there is China, in which one recent figure said that 28,000 Christians are being made there everyday. If you project that for a decade or so, it will mean a very powerful spread of the gospel there.

More exciting than that are some of the things he said about revival which I pray will come to pass:

Christians may currently be partially disarmed or unarmed for Christian warfare, but if they tensed up the society would feel the brunt of this.

...

Evangelicals are very strong on Scripture, tradition, and reason. Charismatics and Pentecostals have been real strong on experience, to some degree also on Scripture. They have not been at all involved deeply in tradition, and sometimes don't make enough use of reason. But what I see coming is a balance of all of this. My hope is that we will not have glossolalic and non-glossolalic communities all absolutely isolated from one another, but that we will have communities in which the nine gifts in 1 Corinthians 12 are displayed. Evangelicals could use some of these, words of knowledge, words of wisdom. I see more of a vanilla-fudge mixture coming in the future, where you can’t tell the Charismatics from the Evangelicals.

...

If you are going to see this whole society revived the way it was in the first fifty years of the 19th century (1800-1850), you are going to have to have a massive educational revival. Because if you are going to find one toxic drip that has been dripping into us, it is our school systems.