The PhD program at the GTU is distinguished by faculty-initiated, interdisciplinary research collaboratives. This approach centers doctoral students’ work in a classical discipline of theology and religious studies within a research group dedicated to a specific question that cuts across multiple fields. Each collaborative explores a question or problem shared by two or more faculty organizers in their current research within the context of established fields in theology, the humanities, and the social sciences. Click below to learn more about the research collaboratives available to doctoral students at the GTU.
Question: What are the ways in which religion can and does contribute to human and planetary flourishing in the face of climate crisis and an uncertain future?
Fields: Religion & the Natural Sciences, Environmental Humanities, Religion & Sustainability Studies, Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Technology & Religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Resilience Studies, Contemplative Studies, Religion & Practice, and Critical Theory.
Timeframe: FA 2026 through Spring 2030 (3 Academic Years)
Organizers: Rita D. Sherma, Braden Molhoek, Ahmed Khater
Description: This research collaborative examines the intersection of the Environmental Humanities, Natural Sciences, Theology, Religion & Sustainability Studies, and Ethics. The collaborative will sponsor research into the potential and current (a) ameliorative influences of religious ethics, religious philosophy, and practices, and as well as (b) the prophetic voice of contemporary critical-constructive theology, in relation to: 1) the effects of climate change including displacement, scarcity, extinction, and human existential trauma; 2) the economic repercussions of climate crisis & the negative population growth as tipping points being reached across regions; 3) the cascading effects of growing unemployment due to automation, and forthcoming advances in AI on work fulfillment; 4) the impact of AI generation on energy and water consumption. This research collaborative will assess both (a) the impacts of religious involvement in policies that are complicit in the deepening of the ecological crisis, and (b) the extensive ongoing initiatives of different religious organizations and traditions aimed at alleviating impacts of the current polycrisis and mitigating environmental damage globally, leading to potential resilience and flourishing.
Question: How are advances in science and technology affecting human culture, society, and even human nature itself? In what ways are religious traditions and theology affected, and how can they respond to ethical concerns raised by science and technology and their impact?
Fields: Christian Studies, Ethics, Islamic Studies, Theology and Science, Systematic Theology
Timeframe: Fall 2026 through Spring 2029
Organizers: Ahmed Khater, Braden Molhoek, Robert John Russell, Ted Peters
Description: This collaborative will explore the theological and ethical implications of emerging science and technology, including but not limited to, new insights into physics and biology, gene editing, artificial intelligence (AI), and computer-brain interfaces (CBIs). Science and technology have been shaping society for millennia, which allows for study of historical trends and perspectives. Technological advances though have also accelerated in the past several centuries and even decades, presenting novel challenges to religious traditions and theology today. Gene sequencing and editing, as well as the rise of automation and research on AI, have the potential to not only alter human society, but what it means to be human as well. Transhumanists seek to take control of human evolution to improve the human condition for some, and to create one or more post-human species for others. Scholars in this collaborative seek to raise and address ethical concerns raised by new insights in science and the use of emerging technology and how religion not only responds to change, but suggest ways in which theological convictions should guide the development and use of emerging technology.
Question: What is the significance of vulnerability, both human and divine, in theology?
Fields: Systematic Theology, Pastoral Theology, Theological Ethics, Philosophical Theology, Biblical Theology
Timeframe: FA 2026 through Spring 2030 (4 Academic Years)
Organizers: Deidre Green and Chris Hadley
Description: The collaborative seeks to develop constructive, critical responses to two problematic strains that occur in some modern theology: 1) the “valorization” of human vulnerability and 2) the projection of valorized vulnerability onto God. The first theological tendency involves a potentially harmful moral and ascetical assignation of value to suffering, which is then intensified when granted a specious divine validation in the second. These two problems are not entirely new, but they have taken on new life in what has been called a “vulnerable turn” in modern theology. There are other more positive and constructive theologies of suffering and vulnerability that counter this valorization of vulnerability. What most of these approaches have in common are references to the Pauline notion of kenosis from Philippians 2:5–11 as a starting point. Many of these theologies of vulnerability display an openness (more or less developed) to the pneumatological dimensions of the God-world relation in the context of suffering.
Question: How does the reception of biblical traditions, narratives, and texts, from their origins in the Ancient Near East to their many uses throughout the world today, impact the interpretation of the bible within and across concrete and specific cultural and social contexts?
Fields: Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near Eastern History and Archeology, New Testament, History of Christianity (early, medieval, early modern, and modern), Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Art and Religion, Theology (Historical, Systematic).
Timeframe: FA 2026 through Spring 2030 (4 Academic Years)
Organizers: Deena Aranoff, Aaron Brody, Jeremiah Coogan, Rebecca Esterson, LeAnn Flesher, Ahmed Khater, Christopher Ocker, Sam Shonkoff
Description: Whereas the history of interpretation focuses on the methods and results of biblical exegesis in distinct historical settings, reception history includes the transmission, adaptation, and reception of the entire spectrum of biblical traditions, narratives, and texts, from before the formations of a biblical canon in the Ancient Near East and late antiquity, to the present. By combining the varied expertise of the organizers in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the ANE and ancient Israel, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Period, the Modern Period, and today, the Research Collaborative will provide an exceptionally strong basis for doctoral candidates who wish to locate research in any one of these periods in a broad context of the bible’s role in cultures, and vice-versa, in the context of the role of cultures in the generation and reproduction of biblical meaning.
Question: What is the interdependence of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theological concepts of God, and do these traditions share one or several ways to entangle or disentangle physical and metaphysical accounts of divine nature and its relationship to the universe?
Fields: Systematic Theology, Historical Theology, Christian Studies, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Theology and Natural Science
Timeframe: FA 2026 through SP 2029
Organizers: Christopher Hadley, Ahmed Khater, Braden Molhoek, Christopher Ocker, Anselm Ramelow
Description: This collaborative will study divine being as a subject of historical and current theology at the intersection of ancient, medieval, and modern traditions, but also in the distinctive cultural contexts of the Middle East, “the West,” and elsewhere. Of particular interest is the way cultural contexts and distinctive philosophical interests complement one another to build a fuller understanding of infinite being, including the interests of traditional western and middle-eastern metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and modern science.
Question: What force do material things, physical environments, and bodily experiences exercise in religious life, past and present?
Fields: Arts and Religion (art practice, museum studies, performance, literature), Anthropology, History of Art, Hindu and Yoga Studies, History of Christianity (early, medieval, early modern, modern, eastern, global), Jewish Studies, Islamic Studies, Theology, Cultural Heritage Studies
Timeframe: FA 2026 through Spring 2030 (4 Academic Years)
Organizers: Kathryn Barush, Aaron Brody, John Klentos, Braden Molhoek, Christopher Ocker, Elizabeth Peña, Rita Sherma, Sam Shonkoff, Devin Zuber
Description: This research collaborative probes the nexus of materiality (writ large) and religion. The collaborative supports research into 1) the affordances and agency of concrete things with respect to any aspect of religion and spirituality; 2) natural and artificial environments and ecologies as co-active with objects, human bodies, and minds in productions of religious experience and knowledge, including pilgrimage, ritual performances, and mysticism; 3) the specific effects of things, substances, and environments on human cognition, theological reflection, and individual and collective understandings of the physical in religious contexts, including relics, food, and psychedelics, 4) historical and cultural understandings of the physical, including contemporary theories of extended mind and machine intelligence, as well as ontological reconsiderations of what constitutes personhood and the other-than-human; 5) the physical manifestations of thought in symbolic representations, spoken language, and written texts in all of their forms. By bringing together diverse aspects of physical religion, this research collaborative expands conceptions of both materiality and what counts as religious or theological, taking a concrete approach to things often essentialized as transcendent or immaterial.
Question: How does bringing women’s, gender, and sexuality studies to bear on theology illuminate how religious traditions are both sources of oppression and potential sites of liberation for human beings with marginalized gender identities and/or sexual orientations?
Fields: Women’s Studies; Gender Studies; Theology; Philosophical Theology; Systematic Theology; Theological Anthropology; History; Cultural Studies; Religion and Society; Spirituality; Christian Spirituality
Timeframe: FA 2026 through Spring 2030 (4 Academic Years)
Organizers: Deidre Green, Kirsi Stjerna
Description: This research collaborative recognizes gender and sexuality as critical categories for theological analysis. It explores the intersection of the study of women, gender, sexuality, and religion, emphasizing conversations across differences of race, sexual and gender orientation, ethnicity, class, culture, nationality, and religious orientation. Some of the driving questions of this research collaborative include: How do gender and sexuality, as well as marginalization as a result of gender and sexuality, shape religious experience and the development of subjectivity of religious individuals? How must theological concepts be reconfigured to empower those who experience marginalization due to gender identity and sexual orientation? How are women and other marginalized gender identities shaping and leading religious traditions? Applying women’s, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS) to theology and religious studies calls for reinterpreting sacred texts, challenging traditional concepts and doctrines and the assumptions about human nature on which they are based, and analyzing the role of world religions in constructing various understandings of gender and sexuality.
The main organizers will start with a two-fold plan: (1) focusing on how theology and doctrine impact women and how women have reshaped theology and doctrine and (2) working on individual women within different periods and traditions. The collaborators will rely on other scholars from the consortium, UC Berkeley, and other areas of the world, to expand the conversation to include a broader approach that includes gender fluidity and diversity and sexual orientation as lenses through which to reassess religious traditions, mining for constructive resources that liberate identities that challenge traditional gender binaries and heteronormativity. We intend for this research collaborative to be multi-disciplinary, inclusive of a large variety of different research paths, in a way that draws on the array of relevant expertise held by the Women’s Studies in Religion Committee faculty.