Date: December 8, 2025
For the next two months, the Dean’s Commentary will feature text by VTS & GTS faculty members writing about what they are currently teaching, reading, or writing about.
As Dr. Knowles mentioned in the Dean’s Commentary on Monday, the scholarly work of seminary faculty can seem invisible to many who are engaged in seminary life. That’s unfortunate because we have one of the most prolific faculty of any stand-alone denominational seminary in the country. The weekend before Thanksgiving, two of the oldest scholarly guilds in the US, the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, met jointly in Boston for their annual meeting, which every year is attended by upwards of 20,000 scholars from all over the world. At this year’s conference, VTS faculty presented the following:
Ruthanna Hooke, Preaching Politics from Luke’s Gospel
Judy Fentress Williams, Exploring the Methodological Implications of Womanist Biblical Interpretation
Melody Knowles (with Anna Milton), Seeing “The Compassionate One” (1978) in “The Passion of the Christ” (2004)
Stephen Cook, Tangible Holiness and Divine Complexity: Theological Reflections from Writing on Ezekiel
And GTS faculty presented the following:
Michael DeLashmutt, Spirit in the Machine: Anglican Theology and the Emergence of AI-mediated Spirituality
Eric Thomas, “Women, Gender, and Sexuality 25 Years After Paul and Politics, edited by Richard Horsley”
Every year faculty publish books and articles, and on December 10, we will host a reception in Scott Lounge to note the faculty books that were published in the last year and to celebrate the good work of fine excellent scholars on our faculty. I hope you can join us.
John Allan Knight, J.D., Ph.D.
Director of Faculty Research
Sprigg Visiting Professor of Philosophical Theology and Ethics