Seminary Stages Damascus Road March 29
—A musical based on the life of St. Paul as told in Acts—

Princeton, NJ, March 12, 2008–Princeton Theological Seminary will present Damascus Road, a musical based on the life of St. Paul, at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 29 in the auditorium of the Mackay Campus Center on the Seminary campus.

Written by Gordon Graham, the Seminary’s Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts, and music by John Kitchen, senior lecturer and university organist at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Damascus Road was first written and performed in 1985, and subsequently revised for further performances in 1988 and 1994. The cast for this performance includes Seminary students, staff and faculty members, and children of faculty and staff.

The story of Saul’s conversion is one of the most dramatic in Christian history, and also one of the most important. It was Saul, become Paul, who grasped the universal implications of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus more immediately than any of the other apostles, while at the same time seeing in the gospel an essential continuity with the faith of Abraham and the hopes of Judaism.

“How do you make something both entertaining and religiously educational?” questions Graham. “That’s the task we’ve set ourselves in Damascus Road. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus is so familiar, it easily loses its edge. We want to tell it again in a style so different that even the most ‘churched’ audience will hear this truly amazing story afresh.”

For the most part the lyrics stick closely to the familiar account of Acts, while the deliberate choice of a wide variety of semi-popular types of music places them in a new and unfamiliar context. Humorous episodes and serious themes are woven together in an attempt to bring out the changing emotional landscape that Paul’s story discloses. “The actual history of Paul’s death is unknown, so the final sequence of songs is based on the long-standing tradition that he, like so many others, was a victim in one of the Emperor Nero’s anti-Christian persecutions,” says Graham

The musical is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Gordon Graham at gordon.graham@ptsem.edu or Martin Tel at martin.tel@ptsem.edu.

Princeton Theological Seminary was founded in 1812 as the first seminary established by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. It is the largest Presbyterian seminary in the country, with more than 700 students in seven graduate degree programs.