Faculty Profiles
Faculty biographical information in this bulletin is subject to change. Readers may obtain more up-to-date information, as well as C.V.s and contact information, by consulting the individual faculty information pages on the Yale Divinity School Web site, www.yale.edu/divinity/Fac.meet.shtml
Harold W. Attridge Dean of Yale Divinity School and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament. Dean Attridge has made scholarly contributions to New Testament exegesis and to the study of Hellenistic Judaism and the history of the early Church. His publications include Hebrews: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, First-Century Cynicism in the Epistles of Heraclitus, The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius Josephus, and Nag Hammadi Codex I: The Jung Codex, as well as numerous book chapters and articles in scholarly journals. He has edited twelve books, most recently, with Dale Martin and Jürgen Zangenberg, Religion, Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Galilee. He has been an editorial board member of Catholic Biblical Quarterly, the Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Biblical Literature, and the Hermeneia Commentary Series. He has been active in the Society of Biblical Literature and served as president of the society in 2001. A.B. Boston College; B.A., M.A. Cambridge University (Marshall Scholar); Ph.D. Harvard University (Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows). (Roman Catholic)
Joel S. Baden Assistant Professor of Old Testament. Professor Baden’s areas of research are the Pentateuch and Biblical Hebrew. His first book, J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch, was published by Mohr Siebeck in 2009, and he co-edited the volume The Strata of P, published by Theologischer Verlag in 2009. He has scholarly articles in print or in press in The Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and Hebrew Studies. He is currently writing a handbook on the source criticism of the Pentateuch for the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. Future projects include a commentary on Deuteronomy, a collection of studies on the volitive sequence in Biblical Hebrew, a monograph on the patriarchal promises in the Pentateuch, and a study of the redactional techniques in the Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic History. B.A. Yale University; M.A. University of Chicago; Ph.D. Harvard University. (Jewish)
Christopher A. Beeley Walter H. Gray Associate Professor of Anglican Studies and Patristics. Professor Beeley teaches early Christian theology and history and modern Anglican tradition. He is the author of Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of the collection Toward a Theology of Leadership (Anglican Theological Review). Current projects include a broad study of Patristic Christology and a book on the basic principles of pastoral leadership in the early church. Professor Beeley is a director of the North American Patristic Society and the American Society of Church History and a founding member of the Gathering of Leaders, a leadership renewal initiative in the Episcopal Church. An Episcopal priest, he is involved in Berkeley Divinity School’s Anglican formation program, and he has served parishes in Texas, Indiana, Virginia, and Connecticut. B.A. Washington and Lee University; Dip. Angl. Stud. Berkeley Divinity School at Yale; M.Div. Yale Divinity School; Ph.D. University of Notre Dame. (Episcopal)
Teresa Berger Professor of Liturgical Studies. Professor Berger holds doctorates in both dogmatic theology and liturgical studies; her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of those fields with gender theory and with cultural studies. She has written extensively on liturgy and gender and produced in 2007 a video documentary called Worship in Women’s Hands. Her recent publications include Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History; Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context; and Fragments of Real Presence. She has also published monographs on the hymns of Charles Wesley and on the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival. In 2008, Professor Berger produced (with MysticWaters Media) an interactive CD-ROM called Ocean Psalms, featuring meditations, prayers, songs, and blessings, all focused on the sea. Most recently, she edited the volume The Spirit in Worship—Worship in the Spirit, to be published by Liturgical Press in late 2009. Professor Berger has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Mainz, Münster, Berlin, and Uppsala. In 2003, she received the distinguished Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church. L.Th. St. John’s College, Nottingham; M.Th. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz; Dr.Theol. Ruprecht Karl-Universität, Heidelberg; Dipl.Theol. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz; Dr.Theol., Habilitation Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster. (Roman Catholic)
Joseph H. Britton President and Dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Associate Dean for Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School. Dean Britton has extensive pastoral experience in parishes of the Episcopal Church in the United States and Europe. He served as Canon Missioner of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe and was the founding director of the Institute of Christian Studies. With wide involvement in ecumenical relationships, he has a particular academic interest in piety as the synthesis of religious faith and practice in the lives of believing men and women. As an Episcopal Church Foundation Fellow, he completed a dissertation on “Piety as Participation in the Divine Concern: The Mystical Realism of A. J. Heschel.” Dean Britton has served as associate editor of the Anglican Theological Review and was a member of the Standing Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations of the Episcopal Church. He has published articles in the Anglican Theological Review, Sewanee Theological Review, and Anglican and Episcopal History. A.B. Harvard University; M.Div., D.D. The General Theological Seminary; Th.D. Institut Catholique de Paris. (Episcopal)
Adela Yarbro Collins Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation. Professor Yarbro Collins joined the Yale Divinity School in 2000 after teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School for nine years. Prior to that, she was a professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Her first teaching position was at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. She was a member of the executive committee of the Society of New Testament Studies from 2002 to 2003. She was president of the New England Region of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2004–2005. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology by the University of Oslo, Norway, in 1994 and a Fellowship for University Teachers by the National Endowment for the Humanities for 1995–96. Her most recent book is Mark: A Commentary in the Hermeneia commentary series, published in 2007. Among her other publications are Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism; The Beginning of the Gospel: Probings of Mark in Context; Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse; The Apocalypse (New Testament Message series); and The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation. She served as the editor of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Monograph Series from 1985 to 1990. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. B.A. Pomona College; M.A., Ph.D. Harvard University. (Roman Catholic)
John J. Collins Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation. A native of Ireland, Professor Collins was a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Chicago from 1991 until his arrival at Yale Divinity School in 2000. He previously taught at the University of Notre Dame. He has published widely on the subjects of apocalypticism, wisdom, Hellenistic Judaism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. His books include the commentary on Daniel in the Hermeneia series; The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls; Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls; Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age; The Apocalyptic Imagination; Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora; Introduction to the Hebrew Bible with CD-ROM; Does the Bible Justify Violence?; Jewish Cult and Hellenistic Culture; Encounters with Biblical Theology; The Bible after Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age; and King and Messiah as Son of God (with Adela Yarbro Collins). He is co-editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism and has participated in the editing of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is general editor of the Yale Anchor Bible series. He has served as editor of the Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplements, Dead Sea Discoveries, and the Journal of Biblical Literature, and as president of both the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. B.A., M.A. University College, Dublin; Ph.D. Harvard University. D. Litt (Hon), University College Dublin. (Roman Catholic)
Patrick Evans Associate Professor in the Practice of Sacred Music and Director of Music in Marquand Chapel. Professor Evans is committed to the reclaiming and renewal of congregational song. As Director of Music for the daily ecumenical worship in Marquand Chapel, he works with the dean of chapel, student chapel ministers and musicians, and a wide range of students, faculty, and guests from varied denominational backgrounds and musical traditions. He recently joined a team of church musician/teachers convened by the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Missions, spending two weeks in Uganda, where he taught and learned church musicians and pastors from that country, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudan. He has also been on the faculties of the Montreat and Westminster Conferences on Music and Worship, and was director of music for Seattle University’s 2007 Summer Institute for Liturgy and Worship. As a singer, he has been a fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center, the Cleveland Art Song Festival, and the Pacific Music Festival, Sapporo, Japan. He has appeared regularly in opera, oratorio, and recital performances, and has sung All the Way Through Evening: Songs from the AIDS Quilt Songbook throughout the United States. He has served as artist-in-residence at Union Theological Seminary, and he currently serves in the same capacity at Broadway Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. Minister of music for ten years at Hanover Street Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware, Professor Evans was previously associate professor of music at the University of Delaware, where he chaired the voice faculty and directed the opera program. B.M., B.M.E. University of Montevallo; M.M., D.M. Florida State University. (Presbyterian Church USA)
Margot E. Fassler Robert Tangeman Professor of Music History. Professor Fassler is an historian who works primarily with the musical and liturgical traditions of the Latin Middle Ages and of the United States. Her subspecialties are liturgical drama of the Middle Ages and Mariology. Her book Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris (Cambridge) has received awards from both the American Musicological Society and the Medieval Academy of America. She has edited a volume on the divine office with Rebecca Baltzer (Oxford University Press), and has just completed a book on the cult of the Virgin Mary at Chartres (forthcoming from Yale University Press). She is the author of numerous articles on a broad range of topics and is currently preparing a book on the twelfth-century theologian, exegete, and composer Hildegard of Bingen, as well as a textbook for W. W. Norton. Her book (edited with Harold Attridge) Psalms in Community is now being reprinted by the Society of Biblical Literature along with the release of her most recent film, Joyful Noise: Psalms in Community. Under the auspices of a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., Professor Fassler continues to work with congregations and practitioners to make videos of sacred music in its liturgical contexts. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. B.A. State University of New York; M.A. Syracuse University; M.A., Ph.D. Cornell University. (Roman Catholic)
Siobhán Garrigan Associate Professor of Liturgical Studies and Associate Dean for Chapel. Professor Garrigan is author of Beyond Ritual: Sacramental Theology after Habermas and a former Government of Ireland humanities scholar. Before coming to Yale, she taught religious studies at the Open University in Belfast and historical/systematic theology at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. Prior to teaching, she worked extensively with homeless people. She has coordinated numerous worship services for ecumenical and interfaith gatherings, and published several articles connecting worship, theology, and cultural issues. In addition to writing a book about the daily ecumenical worship program in Marquand Chapel which she directs, and the methods for vibrant, participative worship leadership she has helped to develop there, she is also about to publish The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism, a constructive theological analysis of religious and political practices in Ireland and Northern Ireland. Her long-standing commitments to ecumenism, social justice, and revitalizing Christian worship recently combined to produce a special journal volume called New and Borrowed Rites. B.A. Oxford University; S.T.M. Union Theological Seminary, New York; Ph.D. Milltown Institute, Dublin.
William Goettler Assistant Dean for Assessment and Ministerial Studies. Dean Goettler is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and has served parishes in Albany, N.Y., and Wilmington, Del. For the last ten years he has served as the co-pastor at First Presbyterian Church of New Haven. During that time he has also taught Presbyterian Polity and in the Supervised Ministry program at YDS. His writing in the area of ministry includes the title story in Global Neighbors: Christian Faith and Moral Obligation in Today’s Economy and “The Artist and the Preacher: Can Both Proclaim the Word?,” in the Institute for Reformed Theology Bulletin, as well as a series of essays in the Feasting on the Word lectionary study. Other areas of interest include interfaith dialogue and the broad welcome of gay and lesbian people within the Christian Church. B.A. Allegheny College; M.Div. Union Theological Seminary; D.Min. Andover Newton Theological School. (Presbyterian Church USA)
Bruce Gordon Professor of Reformation History. Professor Gordon, a native of Canada, taught from 1994 to 2008 at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was professor of modern history and deputy director of the St. Andrews Reformation Institute. His most recent book is Calvin (Yale University Press, 2009). Among his other works, The Swiss Reformation was the first comprehensive study of the subject and was named an “Outstanding Publication” for 2003 by Choice magazine. Clerical Reformation and the Rural Reformation examined the creation of the Protestant ministry in Zurich and its numerous parishes in the sixteenth century. Professor Gordon has edited books on the development of Protestant historical writing, the place of the dead in late-medieval and early-modern society, and the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger. He currently heads a project on the Protestant Latin Bible of the sixteenth century and is on the editorial board of two monograph series: St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate), and Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte (Theologischer Verlag Zürich). His research interests range across late-medieval and early-modern religious history, in particular the Swiss and German Reformations, Bibles, devotional literature, the clergy, death and the dead, historical writing and historiography. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. B.A. (Hons) King’s College; M.A. Dalhousie University; Ph.D. University of St. Andrews. (Presbyterian)
John Grim Senior Lecturer and Research Scholar. Mr. Grim, from the Missouri drift plains of North Dakota, came east to study for a Ph.D. with Thomas Berry in the History of Religions at Fordham University. His area of scholarly exploration is indigenous traditions. He undertakes field studies in the summer with Crow people in Montana and, for over a decade, in the winter with Okonogan-Lakes peoples in eastern Washington state. With Mary Evelyn Tucker, he is the co-founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology and series editor of World Religions and Ecology, a ten-volume publication from Harvard University Press and Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. In that series he edited Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community (Harvard, 2001). He has been a professor of religion at Bucknell University and Sarah Lawrence College, where he taught courses in Native American and indigenous religions, world religions, and religion and ecology. His published works include The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983) and edited volumes with Mary Evelyn Tucker titled Worldviews and Ecology (Orbis, 1994), and a Daedalus volume (2001) titled Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? John Grim is president of the American Teilhard Association. He is preparing a book with Ms. Tucker, The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology, for Island Press. He is also a member of Yale’s Center for Bioethics. B.A. St. John’s University (Minnesota); M.A. Fordham University; Ph.D. Fordham University.
Judith M. Gundry Associate Professor (Adjunct) of New Testament, Senior Research Fellow. Professor Gundry held faculty appointments at the Evangelical Theological Faculty in the former Yugoslavia (1986–91) and Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California (1991–98) before being appointed to Yale Divinity School in 1998. Her most recent publications focus on women, gender, and children in early Christianity. She has also published in the area of Pauline soteriology and ethics, including her book Paul and Perseverance: Staying in and Falling Away and articles in Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, and Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. She is the coauthor of A Spacious Heart: Essays on Identity and Belonging. Her current research focuses on Romans and social conventions of reciprocal exchange in the Hellenistic world. Professor Gundry has received research grants from the Pew Evangelical Scholars Program, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, and the Louisville Institute. She was elected to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1997 and has served on various editorial boards (Bulletin for Biblical Research, the New Cambridge Bible Commentary, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament). An active member of the Society for Biblical Literature, she co-chaired the Pauline Epistles Section and is a member of the steering committee of the Children in the Biblical World Consultation. B.A. Westmont College; M.A. Fuller Theological Seminary; Th.D. University of Tübingen. (Episcopal)
Clarence E. Hardy Assistant Professor of the History of American Christianity. Professor Hardy is the author of James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. He has written articles that have appeared in The Journal of Religion, Church History, and The American Quarterly and consider various aspects of black religious culture in the twentieth century. Professor Hardy is especially interested in the evolution of black religious rhetoric in the United States during the interwar and postwar periods. He is currently working on two books that consider how black descriptions of the divine have evolved in the modern period. He has taught American religious history and culture for several years at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A.B. Princeton University; M.Div., M.Phil., Ph.D. Union Theological Seminary. (Baptist)
John E. Hare Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology. His book God and Morality: A Philosophical History gives a framework for a history of ethics, emphasizing the theological premises present in the original versions of the main types of ethical theory. An earlier book, The Moral Gap, develops an account of the need for God’s assistance in meeting the moral demand of which God is the source. In God’s Call he discusses the divine command theory of morality, analyzing texts in Duns Scotus, Kant, and contemporary moral theory. In Why Bother Being Good? he gives a non-technical treatment of the questions “Can we be morally good?” and “Why should we be morally good?” He has also written a commentary on Plato’s Euthyphro in the Bryn Mawr series, and Ethics and International Affairs with Carey B. Joynt. His interests extend to ancient philosophy, medieval Franciscan philosophy, Kant, Kierkegaard, contemporary ethical theory, the theory of the atonement, medical ethics, international relations (he has worked in a teaching hospital and for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives), and aesthetics (he is a published composer of church music). B.A. Oxford University; Ph.D. Princeton University. (Anglican)
Peter S. Hawkins Professor of Religion and Literature. Professor Hawkins’s work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009); Dante: A Brief History (2006); Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize); and The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2000), of which he was co-editor with Rachel Jacoff. His research in the history of biblical reception has produced three co-edited volumes: Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (2006); Medieval Readings of Romans (2007); and From the Margin: Women in the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives (2009). He has also published books on twentieth-century fiction (The Language of Grace, Listening for God, co-edited with Paula Carlson), utopia, and the language of ineffability (Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett). Professor Hawkins’s essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University; in 2006 he won the University’s Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial board of the PMLA, is currently on the selection committee for the Luce Fellows in Theology, and is Northeast regional representative for the Conference on Christianity and Literature. B.A. University of Wisconsin at Madison; M.Div. Union Theological Seminary; Ph.D. Yale University. (Episcopal)
M. Jan Holton Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Professor Holton recently engaged in research in southern Sudan, where she studied the effects of religious belief and practices on illness and insecurity (including trauma and war) among the Dinka people recently repatriated to the region. Her writing projects focus on the dynamics of trauma and resilience in refugee populations. She has also conducted field studies in such conflict- and disaster-ravaged areas as Kakukma Refugee Camp, Kenya, Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Nicaragua. Her other research and teaching interests include intercultural pastoral theology (especially ethnographic perspectives of suffering), medical anthropology, pastoral care in times of crisis (death, dying, grief, addiction, the transition of hope, hospital ministry), and ritual in pastoral care. Her pastoral and clinical experience includes chaplaincy at a level-one trauma center. Professor Holton is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. B.A. Randolph Macon College; M.Div. Union Theological Seminary (Richmond); Ph.D. Vanderbilt University. (United Methodist)
Jeremy F. Hultin Associate Professor of New Testament. Professor Hultin’s research interests include Christian and Jewish discourse about the Law, Pauline studies, and the history of the late Second Temple period. He is also interested in the implications of historical criticism for contemporary theology. He is author of The Ethics of Obscene Speech in Early Christianity and Its Environment, published in 2008. He has presented conference papers on Galatians, Colossians, Clement of Alexandria, Genesis Rabbah, and the Messianic Secret. He is currently writing a commentary on 2 Peter and Jude. B.A. Ohio State University; M.A. Trinity International University; Ph.D. Yale University. (Non-Denominational)
Martin D. Jean Professor of Organ, Professor in the Practice of Sacred Music, and Director of the Institute of Sacred Music. Professor Jean has performed widely throughout the United States and Europe and is known for his wide repertorial interests. He was awarded first place at the international Grand Prix de Chartres in 1986, and in 1992 at the National Young Artists’ Competition in Organ Performance. A student of Robert Glasgow, in the fall of 1999 he spent a sabbatical with Harald Vogel in North Germany. He has performed on four continents and nearly all fifty states. In 2001 he presented a cycle of the complete organ works of Bach at Yale, and his compact discs of “The Seven Last Words of Christ by Charles Tournemire” and the complete “Six Symphonies of Louis Vierne,” both recorded in Woolsey Hall, have been released by Loft Recordings. Recordings of the organ symphonie and Stations of the Cross of Marcel Dupré are forthcoming on the Delos label. B.A., A.Mus.D. University of Michigan.
Willis Jenkins Margaret Farley Assistant Professor of Social Ethics. His research focuses on environmental ethics, sustainable communities, global ethics, and theological ethics. He is author of Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology, published in 2008, editor of The Spirit of Sustainability, and co-editor of the forthcoming Bonhoeffer and King: Receiving Their Legacies for Christian Social Thought. He has significant international experience in community development initiatives, was co-founder of the Episcopal Young Adult Service Corps, and served on the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on World Mission, 2000–2006. B.A. Wheaton College; M.A., Ph.D. University of Virginia. (Episcopal)
Kristen J. Leslie Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling. Professor Leslie’s research focuses on intercultural pastoral theology, pastoral theological implications of sexualized violence, pastoral care with traumatized communities, ministry in higher education with young adults, and pastoral care in the public arena. Her most recent pastoral activity has included working with the chaplains at the United States Air Force Academy on matters of sexualized violence and religious intolerance. In 2005 Professor Leslie co-authored the report that brought to light the problem of Christian proselytizing at the Air Force Academy. She is the author of “Three Decades of Women Writing for Their Lives” in Feminist and Womanist Pastoral Theology and the book When Violence Is No Stranger: Pastoral Care and Counseling with Survivors of Acquaintance Rape. Professor Leslie is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. B.A. College of Wooster; M.Div. Yale University; M.A., Ph.D. Claremont School of Theology. (United Methodist)
Vasileios Marinis Assistant Professor of Christian Art and Architecture. Professor Marinis’s research focuses on the art and architecture of early Christianity and the Middle Ages. He has a particular interest in the ritual, liturgical arts, representations of women and children, as well as the material culture of these periods. He has published on a variety of topics ranging from early Christian tunics decorated with New Testament scenes to medieval tombs and Byzantine transvestite nuns. He is currently preparing a monograph on the interaction of architecture and ritual in the medieval churches of Constantinople. B.A. University of Athens; D.E.A. Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; M.A.R. Yale University; Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (Greek Orthodox)
Gene Outka Dwight Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics. Professor Outka taught in the Department of Religion at Princeton University for ten years, before joining the Yale faculty in 1975. He is the author of Agape: An Ethical Analysis and has co-edited and contributed to the following volumes: Norm and Context in Christian Ethics (with Paul Ramsey) and Religion and Morality and Prospects for a Common Morality (both with John P. Reeder, Jr.). His forthcoming volume, God and the Moral Life: Conversations in the Augustinian Tradition, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2009. He has also published “Universal Love and Impartiality” in the volume The Love Commandments. His articles appear in various journals and encyclopedias, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Religious Studies Review, the Journal of Religion, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, the Dictionary of Christian Ethics, the Encyclopedia of Ethics, The Thomist, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Companion to Philosophy of Religion, The Blackwell Companion to Religious Ethics, and the Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics. From 1992 to 1995, he chaired Yale’s Department of Religious Studies. He was also President of the Society of Christian Ethics in 2001. Professor Outka received a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology for 2006–2007. B.A. University of Redlands; B.D., M.A., Ph.D. Yale University. (Lutheran)
Dale Wood Peterson Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Lecturer in Baptist Polity and History. The Reverend Peterson is an ordained minister of the American Baptist Churches, U.S.A., and served as pastor of the United Church of Stonington, Connecticut, a congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ (U.C.C.), and the First Baptist Church of West Haven, Connecticut, an American Baptist congregation. He served as Baptist Chaplain of Yale University for thirteen years before coming to the Divinity School as Dean of Students in February 2000. Previous ministry positions include college chaplaincy at Dartmouth College, nursing home chaplaincy in Texas, and high school teaching and church youth work in Nazareth, Israel. He has been a member of Yale Religious Ministry and served on the boards of the Alliance of Baptists, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the Nazareth Baptist School, Nazareth, Israel. He currently serves on the board of the American Baptist Churches of Connecticut. B.A. University of Virginia; M.Div. Southern Seminary. (American Baptist)
Sally M. Promey Deputy Director and Professor of Religion and Visual Culture (ISM) and Professor of American Studies (FAS). Professor Promey is Director of the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, generously supported by a grant awarded in 2008 from the Henry Luce Foundation. Prior to arriving at Yale in 2007, she was chair and professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, where she taught for fifteen years. Her scholarship explores relations between visual culture and religion in the United States from the colonial period through the present. Current book projects include volumes titled Religion in Plain View: The Public Aesthetics of American Belief and Written on the Heart: Protestant Visual Culture in the United States. Among earlier publications, Professor Promey’s Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion” at the Boston Public Library received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. Recent articles and book chapters include essays titled “Hearts and Stones: Material Transformation and the Stuff of American Christianities”; “Mirror Images: Framing the Self in Early New England Material Piety”; “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940–1965”; and “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.” Professor Promey is recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a residential fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, two Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (1993 and 2003) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. In 2001 she received the Regent’s Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity from the University System of Maryland; and in 2002 the Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize, University of Maryland. She was co-director (with David Morgan, Duke University) of a multi-year interdisciplinary collaborative project, “The Visual Culture of American Religions,” funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc. A book of the same title, co-edited by Professors Promey and Morgan, appeared in 2001 from University of California Press. In 2004 she was senior historian in residence for the Terra Summer Residency Program in Giverny, France. She serves on the editorial boards of Material Religion, American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio, the Council of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, and the Advisory Committee of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. B.A. Hiram College; M.Div. Yale University; Ph.D. University of Chicago. (United Church of Christ)
Lamin Sanneh D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and Professor of History. Professor Sanneh is the author of more than a hundred articles on religious and historical subjects and several books. Most recently he has published Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa and Faith and Power: Christianity and Islam in “Secular” Britain (with Lesslie Newbigin and Jenny Taylor). He has also written The Crown and the Turban: Muslims and West African Pluralism; Religion and the Variety of Culture: A Study in Origin and Practice; Piety and Power: Muslims and Christians in West Africa; and Het Evangelie is Niet Los Verkrijgbaar, Whose Religion is Christianity?, The Gospel Beyond the West, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity, the inaugural volume in the Oxford Studies in World Christianity series of which he is series editor, and is co-editor of The Changing Face of Christianity (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). He writes articles for scholarly journals, including Church History: Studies on Christianity and Culture; Newsletter of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (University of Leiden, The Netherlands); The Times Literary Supplement; and The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion. He is working on a book on Islam and the Transmission of Ideas under contract with Harvard University Press. He is Honorary Research Professor in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University. He is chair of Yale’s Council on African Studies. He is an editor-at-large of the ecumenical weekly The Christian Century and a contributing editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, and he serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals and encyclopedias. He has served as consultant to the Pew Charitable Trusts and been listed in Who’s Who in America. He was an official consultant at the 1998 Lambeth Conference in London and is a member of the Council of 100 Leaders of the World Economic Forum. He was appointed by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Commission of the Historical Sciences, and by Pope Benedict XVI to the Pontifical Commission on Religious Relations with Muslims. He was the recipient of the John W. Kluge Chair in the Cultures and Societies of the South by the Library of Congress. For his academic work, he was made Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Lion, Senegal’s highest national honor. M.A. University of Birmingham (England); Ph.D. University of London. (Roman Catholic)
Carolyn J. Sharp Associate Professor of Hebrew Scriptures. Professor Sharp’s research explores aspects of the composition and theology of Hebrew Scripture texts. In recent articles, she has analyzed the rhetoric of Hosea with reference to the contemporary homiletical aesthetic of Jeremiah Wright, interpreted redaction in a way that honors the inscribing of “foreignness” within biblical witness, and urged the creation of a multivocal Old Testament theology grounded in the notion of diaspora identity. Professor Sharp’s first book, Prophecy and Ideology in Jeremiah (2003), treats literary-critical issues in Jeremiah as symptomatic of a post-exilic power struggle over the prophet’s legacy. Her Irony and Meaning in the Hebrew Bible (2009) explores literary and theological dimensions of irony in Old Testament texts, and her Old Testament Prophets for Today (2009) offers reflections on the biblical prophets in terms accessible to readers without biblical training. A current project, Wrestle This Word: Old Testament Studies and the Christian Believer, is geared toward seminarians and pastors; this book will reflect theologically on debated issues in Hebrew Scripture studies. Professor Sharp serves on steering committees for the Society of Biblical Literature’s Israelite Prophetic Literature section and Writing/Reading Jeremiah group. An Episcopal Church Foundation Fellow, she is active in the Episcopal Church, preaching and leading parish study groups on biblical theology and hermeneutics. B.A. Wesleyan University; M.A.R., Ph.D. Yale University. (Episcopal)
Frederick Simmons Assistant Professor of Ethics. Professor Simmons’s research and teaching examine the moral implications of Christian theological commitments and the relationships between philosophical and theological ethics. He is completing a book on the ethical and potential soteriological significance of biology for contemporary Christians, and is co-editing a volume on love and Christian ethics. He has taught at Amherst College, La Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, and La Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. B.A. Carleton College; M.Div., M.A., M.Phil. Yale University. (United Methodist)
Yolanda Y. Smith Associate Professor of Christian Education. Professor Smith’s teaching interests include the practice of Christian education with particular attention to the role of the arts, womanist theology, Christian education in the African American experience, and multicultural approaches to Christian education. She is the author of the book Reclaiming the Spirituals: New Possibilities for African American Christian Education. She has also published a wide range of articles and book chapters, including “I Want to Be Ready! Teaching Christian Education in the African American Experience”; “Olivia Pearl Stokes”; and “Not Just Sunday School! Religious Education in the New Millennium: New Visions for Partnership in Ministry and Theological Education.” Currently she is engaged in a research and writing project, in collaboration with Moses N. Moore, Jr., titled “‘Been in the Storm So Long’: Yale Divinity School and the Black Ministry—One Hundred and Fifty Years of Black Theological Education.” In conjunction with this project, Smith and Moore have co-authored the articles “Solomon M. Coles: The First Black Student Officially Enrolled in Yale Divinity School” and “From the Archives: The Prophetic Ministry of Henry Hugh Proctor.” Professor Smith is affiliated with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. She has served as a member of the Yale Divinity School Women’s Initiative on Gender, Faith, and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa and a board member of the AIDS Interfaith Network, New Haven. She is also a past member of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. An ordained Baptist minister, she has served as an associate minister and minister of evangelism and discipleship in the local church. B.A.E., M.Ed. Arizona State University; M.Div. School of Theology at Virginia Union University; M.A., Ph.D. Claremont School of Theology. (Baptist)
Bryan D. Spinks Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and Pastoral Theology. Professor Spinks teaches courses on marriage liturgy; English Reformation worship traditions; the eucharistic prayer and theology, Christology, and liturgy of the Eastern churches; and contemporary worship. Research interests include East Syrian rites, Reformed rites, issues in theology and liturgy, and worship in a postmodern age. His most recent books are Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent, and Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices (both 2006), and Liturgy in the Age of Reason: Worship and Sacraments in England and Scotland 1662–c.1800 (2008). Other recent publications include “Liturgical Theology and Criticism—Things of Heaven and Things of the Earth: Some Reflections on Worship, World Christianity, and Culture” in Christian Worship Worldwide, Expanding Horizons, Deepening Practices; “Renaissance Liturgical Reforms: Reflections on Intentions and Methods” in Renaissance and Reformation Review; “Eastern Christian Liturgical Traditions, Oriental Orthodox” in The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity; and “The Growth of Liturgy and the Church Year” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol.II. Constantine to c.600. He is currently writing a book entitled The Worship Mall, on worship in a postmodern age. Professor Spinks is co-editor of the Scottish Journal of Theology, a former consultant to the Church of England Liturgical Commission, president emeritus of the Church Service Society of the Church of Scotland, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of Churchill College, Cambridge. B.A. Hons., Dip.Th. University of Durham; M.Th. University of London; B.D., D.D. University of Durham. He is a regular Sunday Presbyter in the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry. (Church of England)
Chloë Starr Assistant Professor of Asian Theology. She has previously taught at the universities of Durham, where she was Senior Tutor at St John’s College, and Oxford, where she taught classical Chinese literature. She has published on Chinese literature and Chinese theology. Recent works include Red-light Novels of the late Qing (2007); a co-edited volume, The Quest for Gentility in China (2007); and an edited volume, Reading Christian Scriptures in China (2008). She is currently editing and translating a reader in Chinese Christian theology and working on a volume on memory in Chinese literature. B.A., M.A. University of Cambridge; Kennedy Scholar, Harvard; D.Phil. University of Oxford.
Harry S. Stout Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity. Professor Stout is the author of several books, including Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and winner of Christianity Today Best History Book of 2007, the Philp Schaff Prize for best book on the history of Christianity 2006–2007, and the New England Historical Association Best Book Award 2007; The New England Soul, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for history; The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, which received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for biography as well as the Critic’s Award for History in 1991; Dictionary of Christianity in America (of which he was co-editor), which received the Book of the Year Award from Christianity Today in 1990; A Religious History of America (co-author with Nathan Hatch); and Readings in American Religious History (co-edited with Jon Butler). With Kenneth Minkema he co-edited Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth. He most recently contributed to and co-edited Religion in the American Civil War and is currently co-editing Religion in American Life, a seventeen-volume study of the impact of religion on American history for adolescent readers and public schools (with Jon Butler). He is general editor of both The Works of Jonathan Edwards and the “Religion in America” series for Oxford University Press. He has written articles for the Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, Journal of American History, Theological Education, Computers and the Humanities, and Christian Scholar’s Review. He is a contributor to the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, and the Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West. In 2003 Professor Stout was awarded the Robert Cherry Award for Great Teaching. He currently serves as general editor and director of the Jonathan Edwards Center and is working with Tony Blair in the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, an organization designed to promote interfaith dialogue around the world. B.A. Calvin College; M.A., Ph.D. Kent State University. (Presbyterian)
Frederick J. Streets Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Pastoral Theology. Professor Streets is the former Chaplain of Yale University and Senior Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale. He has served as an adjunct member of the Clinical Social Work faculty at the Yale Child Study Center and is a licensed clinical social worker. His research, publication, and teaching interests are in pastoral theology, institutional leadership and development, law and religion, social welfare, and global mental health. A native of Chicago, Illinois, he served as the senior pastor of the Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut for seventeen years. Under his leadership the congregation grew, built a new facility, and developed programs that met the needs of the urban community. As a member of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma team and in conjunction with the mental health community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he assisted in implementing there a model of psychiatric and pastoral care of those traumatized by war. He continues to train religious and mental health professionals in dealing with trauma and recovery. Professor. Streets was a 2007–2008 Fulbright Scholar who conducted HIV and AIDS research and taught in the Department of Practical Theology at the University of Pretoria in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the editor of Preaching in the New Millennium, published by Yale University Press in 2005, and author of numerous articles, book chapters, and essays. B.A., D.D. Ottawa University (Kansas); M.Div. Yale University; M.S.W., D.S.W. Yeshiva University. (American Baptist/Progressive National Baptist)
Paul F. Stuehrenberg Divinity Librarian and Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Theological Literature. Professor Stuehrenberg’s areas of academic interest include the history of the interpretation of the Bible; theological bibliography, especially the documentation of world Christianity; and the role of the library in theological education. His articles have been published in Novum Testamentum, Sixteenth Century Journal, the Journal of Religious and Theological Information, Elenchus Bibliographicus Biblicus, Theological Education, the Journal of Pacific History, and the Anchor Bible Dictionary. He is active in the American Theological Library Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. B.A. Concordia Senior College; M.Div. Concordia Seminary; S.T.M. Christ Seminary; M.A., Ph.D. University of Minnesota. (Lutheran)
Diana Swancutt Associate Professor of New Testament. A Society of Biblical Literature Regional Scholar and recent winner of the Lilly/ATS Faculty Sabbatical Grant, Professor Swancutt combines interests in gender, ethnicity and empire studies, rhetoric, ideological criticism, and ancient social practices in her interdisciplinary research. She focuses on early Christian identity formation in Pauline communities, particularly the resocialization of Greeks into Pauline Christian Judaism. Her first book, Pax Christi: Empire, Identity, and Protreptic Rhetoric in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, will be published this year. Among her current writing projects are monographs on the effects of Roman imperialism on religious and ethnic education in Pauline communities, and on gender ideology and the Body of Christ. Among the courses she teaches are Gender in Early Christianity, Crafting Early Christian Identities, the Modern Jesus, Queer Praxis and the Church, Pauline Ethics, Reading the Bible Differently: Epistemology and Community-Based Interpretation, and exegesis classes in the Pauline letters. B.S., B.A. University of Florida; M.Div., Ph.D. Duke University
Leonora Tubbs Tisdale Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics. Professor Tisdale teaches the theory and practice of preaching, with research interests in congregational studies and preaching, women’s ways of preaching, and prophetic preaching. She is the author or editor of seven books including Preaching as Local Theology and Folk Art; Making Room at the Table: An Invitation to Multicultural Worship; and three volumes of The Abingdon Women’s Preaching Annual. She wrote the chapter on the Riverside Church preachers in The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York, and has most recently co-edited a book for teachers of preaching titled Teaching Preaching as a Christian Practice. A former president of the Academy of Homiletics, Professor Tisdale has served on the faculties of Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now Union-PSCE) and Princeton Theological Seminary, and as adjunct faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She also served on the pastoral staff of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City, where she provided theological oversight for the Center for Christian Studies, an innovative lay theological academy offering courses for over 2,000 people in the greater New York area. B.A. University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill; D.Min. Union Theological Seminary in Virginia; Ph.D. Princeton Theological Seminary. (Presbyterian Church USA)
Emilie M. Townes Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Studies in Religion and Theology and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Professor Townes’s teaching and general research interests focus on Christian ethics, womanist ethics, critical social theory, cultural theory and studies, as well as on postmodernism and social postmodernism. Her specific interests include health and health care; the cultural production of evil; analyzing the linkages among race, gender, class, and other forms of oppression; and developing a network between African American and Afro-Brazilian religious and secular leaders and community-based organizations. Among her many publications are Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health and a Womanist Ethic of Care; Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope; and In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness. Her most recent publication is Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. Prior to her appointment at Yale, Professor Townes served as the Carolyn Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She is a former president of the American Academy of Religion. Professor Townes is an ordained American Baptist clergywoman. A.B., A.M., D.Min. University of Chicago; Ph.D. Northwestern University. (American Baptist)
Thomas H. Troeger J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication. Professor Troeger has written eighteen books in the fields of preaching, poetry, hymnody, and worship and is a frequent contributor to journals dedicated to these topics. His most recent books include So that All Might Know: Preaching That Engages the Whole Congregation (co-authored with H. Edward Everding, Jr.), Preaching and Worship, Preaching While the Church is Under Reconstruction, and Above the Moon Earth Rises: Hymn Texts, Anthems and Poems for a New Creation. He is also a flutist and a poet whose work appears in the hymnals of most denominations and in SATB anthem settings by many contemporary composers. For three years Professor Troeger hosted the Season of Worship broadcast for Cokesbury, and he has led conferences and lectureships in worship and preaching throughout North America, as well as in Denmark, Holland, Australia, Japan, and Africa. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1970 and in the Episcopal Church in 1999, he is dually aligned with both traditions. He is a former president of the Academy of Homiletics and is currently co-president of Societas Homiletica (the international guild of scholars in homiletics). He is also serving a two-year term as the national chaplain to the American Guild of Organists. B.A. Yale University; B.D. Colgate Rochester Divinity School; S.T.D. Dickinson College; D.D. Virginia Theological Seminary. (Presbyterian and Episcopal)
Mary Evelyn Tucker Senior Research Scholar and co-founder and co-director (with John Grim) of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, www.yale.edu/religionandecology/. Together Ms. Tucker and Mr. Grim organized a series of ten conferences on World Religions and Ecology at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions. They are series editors for the ten volumes from the conferences distributed by Harvard University Press. They are also editors for an eighteen-volume series on Ecology and Justice from Orbis Press. Ms. Tucker is the author of Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter Their Ecological Phase; Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese Neo-Confucianism and The Philosophy of Qi, published in 2007. She co-edited Worldviews and Ecology, Buddhism and Ecology, Confucianism and Ecology, and Hinduism and Ecology and When Worlds Converge. With Tu Weiming she edited two volumes on Confucian Spirituality. She also co-edited a Daedalus volume titled Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? She edited Thomas Berry’s Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community, Sacred Universe, and Christian Future and the Fate of Earth. She received a doctorate in East Asian religions with a concentration in Confucianism in China and Japan. She is a research associate at the Reischauer Institute at Harvard. From 1993 to 1996 she held a National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. Since 1987 she has been a member of the Interfaith Partnership for the Environment at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). She served on the International Earth Charter Drafting Committee from 1997 to 2000 and is now a member of the Earth Charter International Council. B.A. Trinity College; M.A. SUNY Fredonia; M.A. Fordham University; Ph.D. Columbia University.
Denys Turner Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology. Professor Turner has taught on a wide range of subjects, including contemporary philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, political and social theory, medieval philosophy and theology, and the history of medieval mysticism. His area of concentration is the study of the traditions of Western Christian mysticism, with special emphasis on doctrines of religious language and of selfhood and on the links between the classical traditions of spirituality and mysticism and the social and political commitments of Christianity. He has written numerous books and articles on these subjects, most recently Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God; Faith Seeking; The Darkness of God; and Eros and Allegory. He is working on a monograph on the theology of Julian of Norwich, is editing (with Philip McCosker) the Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas and, in the longer term, is working on a monograph drawing together issues in Christian spirituality with the political commitments of Christians. He has served as a member of the Executive Committee and as chair of the Catholic Institute for International Relations, the Committee for the World of Work of the Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops of England and Wales, the Laity Commission of the Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops of England and Wales, and the Anglican Roman Catholic Commission for England. Prior to his appointment at Yale, Professor Turner served as the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. B.A., M.A. University College, Dublin; D.Phil. (Oxon) University of Oxford. (Roman Catholic)
Miroslav Volf Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Professor Volf’s books include The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006) and Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (2006), Archbishop of Canterbury Lenten book for 2006; Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996), a winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award; and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (1998), winner of the Christianity Today book award. A member of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and the Evangelical Church in Croatia, Professor Volf was involved in international ecumenical dialogues (for instance, with the Vatican Council for Promotion of Christian Unity) and interfaith dialogues (most recently in Christian-Muslim dialogue). A native of Croatia, he regularly teaches and lectures in Central and Eastern Europe. B.A. Evangelical Theological Faculty, Zagreb; M.A. Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena; Dr.Theol., Dr.Theol.habil. University of Tübingen. (Episcopal)
Tisa J. Wenger Assistant Professor of American Religious History. Professor Wenger’s research and teaching interests include the history of “religion” as a cultural category, the politics of religious freedom, religion in the American west, and the intersections between ideologies of race and religion as they impact Native Americans and other racial/religious minorities in U.S. history. Her book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom shows how dominant conceptions of religion and religious freedom affected the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico as they sought to protect their religious ceremonies from government suppression, and how that struggle helped reshape mainstream views of religion and the politics of Indian affairs. Among her current writing projects is a new book that will examine the limitations and sometimes unintended consequences of religious freedom as a foundational American ideal. Like We Have a Religion, this research asks how culturally specific formations of religion and religious freedom shape the dynamics of religious encounter and pluralism in America. Other publications include articles in the History of Religions, the Journal of the Southwest, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, along with chapters in several edited volumes. B.A. Eastern Mennonite University; M.A. Claremont Graduate University; M.A., Ph.D. Princeton University.
Andre C. Willis Assistant Professor of the Philosophy of Religion. His main intellectual focus is modern liberal philosophy of religion and theological thought in the West. His current project, “Hume and Hope: A Study in David Hume’s Philosophy of Religion,” argues that a nontraditional concept of hope suffuses Hume’s work. This type of hope, he contends, can be a new, pluralistic source for the philosophy of religion. In addition to his investment in enlightenment thought, Professor Willis is also interested in American Pragmatism and religion, religion and culture, African American thought and history, and jazz music. He is beginning an exploration of the religious and spiritual dimensions of the work of Thornton Wilder, Elizabeth Catlett, Art Blakey, and Hannah Arendt. Recent courses taught include Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion; Process Thought; African American Religious Strategies; and American Religious Thought and the Democratic Ideal. B.A. Yale University; M.T.S. Harvard Divinity School; M.A., Ph.D. Harvard University. (Baptist)
Robert R. Wilson Hoober Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Old Testament. A former chair of the Yale University Department of Religious Studies, Professor Wilson’s areas of academic interest include Israelite prophecy, the Deuteronomistic history, and ancient Israelite religion in its social and cultural context. His books include Genealogy and History in the Biblical World, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (which has been translated into Korean and Portuguese), Sociological Approaches to the Old Testament (which has been translated into Japanese), and Canon, Theology and Old Testament Interpretation (edited with Gene M. Tucker and David L. Petersen). His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature, among others, and he has been a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Religion, the Harper Collins Study Bible, and the Anchor Bible Dictionary. He has been actively involved in the Society of Biblical Literature, serving as chair of the Social Roles of Prophecy in Israel Group, and as the Old Testament editor of the Society of Biblical Literature dissertation series. B.A. Transylvania University; B.D., M.A., Ph.D. Yale University. (Disciples of Christ)
