Faculty

Laurel C. Schneider Professor of Theology, Ethics and Culture

B.A., Dartmouth College, 1983; M.Div., Harvard Divinity School, 1990; M.A., Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 1994, 1997.

Author:Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (Routledge Press, 2007); Re-Imagining the Divine: Confronting the Backlash Against Feminist Theology (Pilgrim Press, 1999).

Professor Schneider’s research addresses key tensions in contemporary ideas of God. She seeks language and concepts that better reflect the complexity of historical Christian theology and that more effectively address the real ways in which faith, theology, science and culture interact in today’s world.

Professor Schneider’s teaching areas include constructive proposals in theology; feminism and postmodernism; the relationships between theological ideas and social organization; queer theory and its intersections with multicultural feminist and womanist approaches to ethics and theology. She is dedicated to the development of stronger, more interesting public theology that understands its historical antecedents and that courageously takes on the critical issues of justice in the world today. Schneider encourages students to use the classroom as a laboratory for bringing their theological insights and passions to voice.

“If there is one thing that I hope to convey to students, it is that theology matters in every sense and nuance of the word. It matters in what we value, in who we understand ourselves to be in community and it manifests itself in the matter of our very lives together, in our bodies, and in our world. I want students to feel the fire I feel when I take up the great and exquisitely intimate question of God among us.”