2013 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture
Thursday, October 31-Saturday, November 2

Featured Speakers

Richard Bauckham is professor emeritus at the University of St Andrews where, until recently, he was professor of New Testament Studies and Bishop Wardlaw Professor. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He also is senior scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge and visiting professor at St Mellitus College, London. From 1996 to 2002 he was general editor of the Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series. In 2009 Bauckham was awarded the Michael Ramsey Prize for his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006), and in 2010 the Franz-Delitzsch-Award for The Jewish World around the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2010). Among his other books are: God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Paternoster, 1998); The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); and Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Baylor Univ. Press, 2010).

C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University. Evans is a founding member of Books and Culture, and he served as editor of the Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter and as president of the Kierkegaard Society and the Society of Christian Philosophers. Evans previously taught at Calvin College, St. Olaf College, Wheaton College, and Trinity College. Evans received the 2012 C. S. Lewis Book Prize for his book Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). His other books include: Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009); The Bible and the University (co-edited with David Jeffrey; Zondervan, 2007); Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Baylor Univ. Press, 2006); and God and Moral Obligation (Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming).

Paul Griffiths is Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity School. He also has held academic positions at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. With research interests in Catholic philosophical theology, philosophical and political questions arising from religious diversity, Augustinian thought, and Gupta-period Indian Buddhist thought, he is a prolific writer and commentator on contemporary culture.  His most recent books include: Song of Songs: A Commentary (Brazos, 2011); Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Wipf & Stock, 2010); and Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2009). He will deliver the Stanton Lectures at Cambridge University in 2013 under the title "The End: An Eschatological Assay."

Jennifer Herdt is the Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Yale Divinity School. Her primary interests are in early-modern and modern moral thought, classical and contemporary virtue ethics, and contemporary Protestant social ethics and political theology. She has served on the board of directors of the Society of Christian Ethics and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics . She is the author of Religion and Faction in Hume's Moral Philosophy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997) and Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Univ. Chicago Press, 2008). Herdt's current project on ethical formation, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman, is supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Paul Martens is associate professor of religion at Baylor University. Specializing in Christian ethics, his research focuses on the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, issues surrounding Christian articulations of pacifism and just war, John Howard Yoder, environmental ethics, and Protestant retrievals of natural law. He is the author of The Heterodox Yoder (Cascade, 2012) and three forthcoming books entitled: Kierkegaard: A (Very) Critical Introduction; Reading Kierkegaard I: A Guide to Fear and Trembling; and Reading Kierkegaard II: A Guide to Works of Love. Martens also has co-edited three volumes on the work of John Howard Yoder.

Kathleen Norris is an award-winning poet, writer, and author. She has published seven books of poetry. Her first, Falling Off (Big Table, 1971), won the Big Table Younger Poets Award for 1971. Norris is the recipient of grants from the Bush and Guggenheim Foundations, and she serves as poetry editor of Spirituality & Health and the nonfiction editor of the Saint Katherine Review. She is an oblate of Assumption Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in North Dakota. Her book Dakota: A Spiritual Biography (Mariner Books, 2001) was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year as well as being selected one of the best books of the year by Library Journal. Additionally, The Cloister Walk (Riverhead Trade, 1997), Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead Books, 1999), and The Virgin of Bennington (Riverhead Trade, 2002) were all New York Times bestsellers. Norris recently authored Acedia and Me: Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life (Riverhead Trade, 2008).

Cyril O'Regan is the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Specializing in systematic and historical theology, he has specific interests in the intersection of continental philosophy and theology, religion and literature, mystical theology, and postmodern thought. He has published numerous articles on such topics as the nature of tradition, negative theology, the sources of G. W. F. Hegel's thought, Hegel as a theological source, and on figures such as John Henry Newman and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of: The Heterodox Hegel (SUNY Press, 1994), Gnostic Return in Modernity (SUNY Press, 2001), and Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative (SUNY Press, 2001).

Simon Podmore is lecturer in systematic theology at Liverpool Hope University. His main interests are in philosophical and systematic theology, particularly the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther, and Rudolf Otto. He has additional interests in Jewish and Christian mysticism, religious experience, Continental philosophy of religion, forgiveness and the problems of suffering and evil, and the relationships between theology, the arts, and psychotherapy. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Indiana Univ. Press, 2011) and Struggling with God: Kierkegaard, Temptation, and Spiritual Trial (James Clarke and Company, 2013).

Anthony Rudd is visiting associate professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College. His interests include epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Rudd has published articles in The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Metaphilosophy, The Journal of Consciousness Studies, The British Journal for History of Philosophy, Inquiry, European Journal of Philosophy, and Kierkegaardiana. He is the author of Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Clarendon, 1993), Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Open Court, 2003), and Self, Value and Narrative: a Kierkegaardian Approach (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).

Sylvia Walsh is scholar in residence in the philosophy department at Stetson University. She teaches courses in the history of western philosophy, philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy, and feminist ethics. She is the author of Living Poetically: Kierkegaard's Existential Aesthetics (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1994), Living Christianly: Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Christian Existence (Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2005), and Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009). She is also co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard (with Céline Léon; Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1997) as well as translator and co-editor of Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (with C. Stephen Evans; Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).

Merold Westphal is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fordham University. He served as president of the Hegel Society of America and the Søren Kierkegaard Society, as executive co-director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, and as a member of the national board of the American Philosophical Association. He is general editor of the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Westphal is the author of History of Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology (3rd ed., Indiana Univ. Press, 1998), which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Award, and God Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), which won an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence. Westphal has written three studies of Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society (Mercer Univ. Press, 1987); Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Purdue Univ. Press, 1996); and Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Indiana Univ. Press, 2008).

Ralph Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, a position he has held since 1998. He previously served on the faculty of Wake Forest University, where he became the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion in 1990. He has also taught at Samford University, at Regent College, and at Providence College. His books include Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Baylor UP, 2011), Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004), Contending for the Faith: Essays in the Church's Engagement with Culture (Baylor UP, 2003), and The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (John Knox, 2003).