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Without Nature? A New Condition for Theology

October 14-15, 2005 (closed working group)
October 26-28, 2006 (public conference)
University of Chicago Divinity School
Swift Hall
1025 East 58th Street
Chicago, Illinois, 60637

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Participant Biographies

David Albertson
One of the co-coordinators of this conference, David Albertson received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Stanford University and his M.Div. from the University of Chicago. He is currently a doctoral student in theology studying the history of Christian thought. His research interests center broadly on gauging the situation of Christian theology in modernity. To this end he is presently studying modernity’s late-medieval origins; his doctoral work addresses the relation of theology and natural philosophy in the work of the fifteenth-century polymath Nicholas of Cusa. Another project focuses on the status of late modern theology through the works of Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In his spare time he enjoys cooking (and eating).

Lisa Sowle Cahill
Lisa Sowle Cahill is J. Donald Monan, S.J., Professor at Boston College, where she has taught theology since l976. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America (l992-93), a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics (l997-98), and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She has been a member of the Catholic Health Association Theology and Ethics Advisory Committee, the National Advisory Board for Ethics in Reproduction, and serves on the March of Dimes National Bioethics Committee. She has given testimony to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on fetal tissue research and on cloning.

Lisa Cahill's most recent works are Bioethics and the Common Good (Marquette University Press, 2004), Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice and Change (Georgetown, 2005), and an edited collection, Genetics, Theology, Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Conversation (Crossroad, 2005). She is the author of six and an editor of five other books and of over 150 essays in books and journals.

Thomas Carlson
Thomas A. Carlson, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1995, is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses in philosophy of religion, contemporary theory, and the history of Christian thought and culture. He is the author of Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and of numerous articles treating deconstruction, phenomenology, and the traditions of apophatic and mystical theology. He is also translator of several works by French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, including God without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Reduction and Donation: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 1998), and The Idol and Distance (Fordham University Press, 2001).

Ronald Cole-Turner
Ronald Cole-Turner, M.Div., Ph.D., teaches at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, holding the H. Parker Sharp Chair of Theology and Ethics, a position that relates theology to developments in science and technology. His research focuses on genetics and biotechnology, particularly as they affect the meaning and the future of human life. He is active in various science and religion organizations, having played a central role in organizing the International Society for Science and Religion, an honorary society of about 120 scholars that was chartered in 2002. He serves on the academic board of the Metanexus Institute and on the advisory board of the John Templeton Foundation. His books include The New Genesis (1993), Pastoral Genetics (co-authored, 1996), Human Cloning: Religious Responses (ed., 1997), Beyond Cloning (ed., 2001), and God and the Embryo (co-edited, 2003), as well as numerous articles and chapters in books. Prof. Cole-Turner lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Rebecca, a psychologist. They have two grown daughters, Sarah and Rachel.

Peter Crane
Professor Sir Peter Crane FRS, who was awarded a knighthood in the Birthday Honours list on 12 June 2004, joins the University of Chicago’s Department of the Geophysical Sciences from The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Professor Crane has held academic appointments in the Department of Botany at the University of Reading, the Department of Geology at Royal Holloway College, University of London and the Department of Biological Sciences at Imperial College. He was elected to the Royal Society - the U.K. Academy of Sciences—in 1998 and currently serves on their Council. In 2001 he was elected a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Member of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Under his direction the Royal Botanic Gardens was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2003. Professor Crane’s own research integrates studies of living and fossil plants to understand large-scale patterns and processes of plant evolution. He is the author of more than 100 scientific publications, including several books on plant evolution. Increasingly he is also engaged in a variety of initiatives focused on the conservation of plant diversity.

Lorraine Daston
Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Honorary Professor at the Humboldt University, Berlin. She is the author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and (with Katharine Park) Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (1998), both winners of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Prize, and editor of Biographies of Scientific Objects (2000), (with Fernando Vidal), The Moral Authority of Nature (2004), and Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004). Her current research concerns the history of scientific objectivity and the relationship between natural and moral orders.

Ronald Engel
Ron Engel is Professor Emeritus at Meadville Lombard Theological School and Senior Research Consultant, The Center for Humans and Nature, with offices in New York and Chicago. He taught in the fields of religious ethics, theology and ministry at Meadville Lombard 1964-2000. He also served as Lecturer in Ethics and Society at the Divinity School, University of Chicago 1977-2000 and as a member of the Environmental Studies Faculty at the University of Chicago.

Ron helped pioneer the new academic fields of environmental ethics, history, and theology/philosophy. Through his work with the Eco-justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches, and as co-director of the Program on Ecology, Justice, and Faith in the Chicago Association of Theological Schools, he contributed to the movement for eco-justice within the ecumenical religious community. Ron became active in international work on behalf of global ethics in the course of research with UNESCO. He was a core member of the international drafting committee for the Earth Charter, and is currently co-chair of the Ethics Specialist Group of the Commission on Environmental Law for the World Conservation Union.

In addition to numerous essays in books and journals, Ron is the author of Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes, which won several book awards, including the Meltzer National Book Award; editor of Voluntary Associations: Socio-cultural Analyses and Theological Interpretation; co-editor of Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge, International Response; and co-author of Justice, Ecology, and Christian Faith: A Critical Guide to the Literature. He is a member of the editorial boards of American Journal of Philosophy and Theology, Environmental Conservation, and Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion.

Ron holds an A. B. from Johns Hopkins, a B.D. (with highest distinction) from Meadville Lombard, and an M.A. and Ph.D. (with distinction) from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.

Michael Fischer
Michael M.J. Fischer was educated at Johns Hopkins (Geography/Liberal Arts), the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.Anthropology), and has taught at Chicago, Harvard, Rice, and MIT. At Rice he was the inaugural director of the Center for Cultural Studies, and from 1996-200 he was the Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. He has done fieldwork in the Caribbean, the Middle East, and South Asia on topics of social change, comparative religion (Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Islam, Judaism, Bahaism, Protestantism), social structures of the bazaar, film and media studies, and the social organization and peopling of new technologies particularly biomedical and networked technologies in the U.S. and India. He is currently beginning new projects on electronic media in the Muslim world, on a reorganization of medical research in Boston, and on ecological narratives in Palestine and Israel. Aside from three books on Iran—Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (1980, 2nd edition 1999); Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (1990, with Mehdi Abedi); and Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (2004)—he is also the author of two books raising the bar on how to do ethnographic and anthropological research in contemporary complex societies—Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986, 2nd edition 1999, both with George Marcus), and Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (2003).

William French
William French is an Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University Chicago. He graduated from Dickinson College in 1973, received his M.Div. degree from Harvard University in 1977 and completed his Ph.D. in the "Ethics and Society" program at the University of Chicago in 1985. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Christianity's responses to emerging ecological concerns. He teaches courses in ethics at the undergraduate level focusing on war and peace issues, ecological ethics, and religion and nature. At the graduate level he offers courses on those areas as well as in the history of Christian ethics and the natural law tradition. His research centers on religious ethics and ecological concerns and on religion, violence and peace-making. He has published on global warming concerns, the Catholic common good tradition, global population rise, the moral status of animal and plant life, green taxation and sustainability, Christian theology and animal rights, and the ecological dimensions of global security. His articles have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Religion, Journal of Environmental Ethics, Soundings, New Theology Review, Christian Century, Theology and Public Policy, Peace Review and Second Opinion. He has also published chapters in a number of books. He has been the recipient of a Louisville Institute Grant for research on a book project, Natural Law and Ecological Concern, a project that continues to occupy his attention. While trained in Christian ethics, French has strong interests in other religious traditions and their understandings of conflict and peace and of humanity's relationship to the rest of the natural world. He has traveled widely in the Mideast, South Asia, and Europe. His courses regularly serve Loyola's Peace Studies and Environmental Studies Programs. He serves on the board of the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education and is a member of a task force working on an Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature.

Timothy Gorringe
Timothy Gorringe worked in parishes for six years before going to South India to teach theology at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary, where he worked for seven years. His links with India remain close. On return to Britain he was for nine years Chaplain, Fellow and Tutor in Theology at St. John's College, Oxford. In 1995 he became Reader in Contextual Theology at St. Andrew's and in 1998 took up his present post at the University of Exeter as St. Luke's Professor of Theological Studies. His academic interests focus on the interrelation between theology, social science, art and politics. His most recent major book is a theology of culture. His recent works include Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Clarendon, 1999), A Theology of the Built Environment (Cambridge, 2002), and Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture (Ashgate, 2004). Aside from theology he is a bee keeper, poultry keeper, theatre goer, home wine maker, political activist, poetry lover and a member of the Iona Community.

Cabell King
Co-coordinator of this conference, a native of the Pacific Northwest, and an outdoor enthusiast, Cabell King is a Ph.D. candidate in theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Cabell's recent writing and thinking have attempted to integrate the theoretical insights and empirical interests of academic social geography with theological anthropology and hermeneutics. He hopes, among other things, this work may prove a fruitful foundation for theological consideration of ecology, economic development, and human community. He teaches writing in the undergraduate Humanities core. Through the Martin Marty Center, Cabell coordinates the Public Theology Workshop. He graduated with a B.A. in Geography from Dartmouth College in 1997, earned an M.A. in Divinity from the University of Chicago in 1999, and spent three years teaching high school religion at St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island. He returned to Chicago in 2002, and he lives with his dog Coltrane in Hyde Park.

Karin Knorr-Cetina
Professor of Anthropology, Sociology and of the Social Sciences in the College, Professor Knorr-Cetina specializes in economic anthropology/sociology, the anthropology of science, knowledge and technology, globalization and global society studies, contemporary social theory, and qualitative methods.

Mary Mahowald
Mary Briody Mahowald, PhD (philosophy), is Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Among her books are Women and Children in Health Care: An Unequal Majority (1993); Disability, Difference, Discrimination (1998, co-authored with Anita Silvers and David Wasserman); Genes, Women, Equality (2000); and Bioethics and Women: Across the Life Span (2006). She has been the principal investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Rockefeller Foundation, served on the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Integration Panel, and as consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment, and the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Gerald McKenny
Gerald McKenny is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body, a Choice Award winner, and co-editor of two other books. He is co-principle investigator of Altering Nature: How Religions Evaluate Biotechnology, a four-year project sponsored by the Ford Foundation. His published articles and book chapters address issues in theological ethics, moral philosophy, biomedical ethics, philosophy of medicine, and the ethics of biotechnology.

Sallie McFague
Sallie McFague is presently Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia. She taught theology for thirty years at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, TN before moving to Canada. She received her B.A. in English literature from Smith College and her subsequent theological degrees from Yale.

Throughout her career she has been interested in the ways that religious language influences ethical positions. Her early work was in the area of the feminist critique of Christian patriarchal language with its subsequent effects on oppressed people and the environment (Metaphorical Theology and Models of God). Her subsequent three books have focused on reconstructing metaphors and models in the Christian tradition which will contribute to a more just and sustainable planet (The Body of God; Super, Natural Christians; and Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril). Thus, issues of anthropology (who are human beings in the scheme of things?), creation (what is the relation between God and the world?), and ethics (what should we be doing in the world?) are of central importance to her, especially as they are understood within a Christian context. This particular religious tradition, now central in public life in the United States, is a critical one to deconstruct and reconstruct along lines that are good for humanity and for the planet. The interpretation of Christianity’s central doctrines can contribute to this conversation.

Stuart Newman
Stuart A. Newman is a professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy at New York Medical College, Valhalla, New York. He received an A.B. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago. He has contributed to several scientific fields, including biophysical chemistry, developmental biology, and evolutionary theory. Newman was a founding member of the Council for Responsible Genetics (Cambridge, MA) and is currently a Fellow of the Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future (Chicago, IL). He has been an INSERM Fellow at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, a Fogarty Senior International Fellow at Monash University, Australia, a visiting scientist at the University of Paris-Sud, the French Atomic Energy Center-Saclay, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Vienna, and the University of Tokyo. He has testified before Congressional committees on issues ranging from patenting of organisms to human stem cells and cloning and was a consultant to the National Institutes of Health on policy regarding the use of human fetal tissue for research. He is co-editor (with Gerd B. Müller) of Origination of Organismal Form: Beyond the Gene in Developmental and Evolutionary Biology (MIT Press, 2003) and co-author (with Gabor Forgacs) of Biological Physics of the Developing Embryo (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Peter Raven
Peter Raven is an internationally renowned conservationist and a Professor of Botany at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Raven also serves as Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, where he has transformed the Garden into one of the world’s leading plant conservation centers. Prior to arriving in St. Louis, Raven completed his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, completed a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught for nine years at Stanford University. He is not only a world leader in the fields of plant evolution and systematics, but has been a major force in the conservation of biodiversity around the world for nearly thirty years. Raven has authored more than 400 articles and 16 books. He belongs to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Pontifical Academy of Scientists, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and has served as Chairman of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

Raven has also been the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation Fellowships. In its 1999 Earth Day issue, Time magazine declared that Raven is one of its “Heroes of the Planet” who is “doing extraordinary things to preserve and protect the environment.” At present Raven studies the possibility of a “sixth extinction” brought about by the mushrooming human population, carelessness and commerce.

William Schweiker
William Schweiker is professor of Theological Ethics in the University of Chicago Divinity School and also teaches in the College at the University of Chicago. He received his M.Div. from Duke University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Schweiker works in the field of theological ethics. His scholarship and teaching cross the disciplinary lines of ethics, systematic theology, and hermeneutical philosophy.

Professor Schweiker's books include Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics (1990); Responsibility and Christian Ethics (1995); Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (1998); and Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (2004). He has published numerous articles and award-winning essays, as well as edited and contributed to five volumes on moral theory and hermeneutics. Professor Schweiker is also chief editor and contributor to A Companion to Religious Ethics (2004), a comprehensive and innovative work in the field of comparative religious ethics. His recent work engages theological and ethical questions attentive to global dynamics, comparative ethics, and the possibilities of a renewed and robust religious humanism. Professor Schweiker is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.

Peter Scott
Peter Scott teaches constructive theology at the University of Gloucestershire. He received his M.A. from the University of Birmingham and his Ph.D. from the University of Bristol. In both teaching and research Scott is committed to relating theological insights to the dilemmas and issues of modern life. His work thereby cuts across disciplinary boundaries and draws on political theory and philosophy as well as Christian theological traditions. He is author of Theology, Ideology and Liberation (Cambridge University Press, 1994), A Political Theology of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and numerous articles, and is co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (2004). Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Theology (UK) from 1995- 2001, he is a member of the Center of Theological Inquiry (Princeton, USA) and is on the editorial board of the journal Ecotheology.

Edward Soja
Edward Soja teaches in the Regional and International Development (RID) area of Urban Planning at UCLA and also teaches courses in urban political economy and planning theory. He spends part of the year teaching at the London School of Economics. After starting his academic career as a specialist on Africa, Soja has focused his research and writing over the past 20 years on urban restructuring in Los Angeles and more broadly on the critical study of cities and regions. His wide-ranging studies of Los Angeles bring together traditional political economy approaches and recent trends in critical cultural studies. Of particular interest to him is the intersection of class, race, gender, and sexuality with what he calls the spatiality of social life, and with the new cultural politics of difference and identity that this generates. In addition to his work on urban restructuring in Los Angeles, Soja continues to write on how social scientists and philosophers think about space and geography, especially in relation to how they think about time and history. His latest book brings these various research strands together in a comprehensive look at the geohistory of cities, from their earliest origins to the more recent development of what he calls the “postmetropolis.” His policy interests are primarily involved with questions of regional development, planning and governance, and with the local effects of ethnic and cultural diversity in Los Angeles. His publications include: Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), and Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000).

Kathryn Tanner
Kathryn Tanner is a professor of theology in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University. Tanner does constructive Christian theology in the Protestant tradition, with the intent of meeting contemporary challenges to belief through the creative use of both the history of Christian thought and interdisciplinary methods, such as critical, social, and feminist theory. Her books God and Creation in Christian Theology and The Politics of God discuss the coherence and practical force of Christian beliefs about God’s relation to the world. Her book Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology explores the relevance of cultural studies for rethinking theological method. Her latest book, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, sketches a systematic theology that centers on the incarnation. She is currently finishing a book on theology and economics.