Current Research Projects
“The Global Hunger and Migration Project”
Principal Investigator: Victor Hinojosa. See https://www.baylor.edu/hungerandpoverty/index.php?id=969960.
“Human Dignity in Religious Traditions” (2019-2021).
Funder: International Center for Law and Religion Studies (BYU), Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies, and Baylor University. Principal Investigators: Dicky Sofjan, Paul Martens, and Brett Scharffs.
“Dios, ¿Está en control? (“Is God in Control?”): Protestant and Pentecostal Interpretations of COVID-19 in Latin America.”
Principal Investigators: Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, Carmelo Alvarez & Reinerio Arce
Themes: Theology of life; human community and eschatology; health and healing; pastoral life.
“Iglesia y pastoral híbrida y digital (“The digital hybrid church ministry”). Exploring Digital Hybridity in Church, Ethics and Pastoral Ministry during COVID-19: Reflections from Puerto Rico and Latino & Immigrant Christian Communities in the US”.
Principal Investigators: Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi and José Rodríguez-Cortés.
Themes: Ecclesiology; Prayer, Spiritual Life and Intercession; Digital Ethics; Liturgy and Worship.
“St. Andrews Fellows in Theology and Science: Post-Doctoral Fellowship”. (2017-2019). Funder: John Templeton Foundation. Amount: $218,176.
Principal Investigators: Matthew Whelan (post-doc) and Paul Martens (supervisor).
The Body of Christ, the Body of the Earth: Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Ecology, and Christology.
Book Project: Josh King.
The "greening" of modern Christianity, the (sometimes troubled) affirmation by clergy, laity, and religious non-profits of solidarity with other creatures through theology, worship, and practice, is often perceived as an overdue conversion of an unworldly religious tradition. This book tells this overlooked story about the ways nineteenth-century British poets pursued what is now regarded as unconventionally "green" in figures such as Pope Francis: they affirmed the solidarity of the Church, Christ's body, with creation, stressing the interconnection of Christians, Christ, and creatures through sacred spaces, worship, theological reflection, and the medium of poetry.
War and Peace Theology.
Book Project: Myles Werntz and Paul Martens.
This short book examines the complex history of Christian theological accounts of war and peace, tracing the arguments chronologically but also illuminating persistent themes and pointing forward to new challenges that demand a reframing of what is often perceived as a dichotomy. This project will be published in the Brill Research Perspectives in Theology series, with the expectation that it will appear in print in 2021.
A Theology of Agricultural Resilience: Toward a New Conversation in Science and Religion.
Book Project: Matthew Whelan.
A Theology of Agricultural Resilience examines the convergences between agroecology’s understanding of agricultural resilience and Christian conceptions of natural law, bringing a largely ignored science (agronomy) into conversations surrounding theology and science. The book argues that agricultural resilience offers an opportunity for Christian theologians and ethicists to clarify, concretize, and develop their account of natural law.
The Grammar of Creation: A Theological Engagement with Agroecology.
Book Project: Matthew Whelan.
The Grammar of Creation begins with Catholic social teaching’s claim that creation has an inbuilt order or grammar, which establishes ends and criteria for tilling and keeping creation. This claim, the book contends, can be deepened and extended in two primary ways. The first is by engaging with agroecology, a field that similarly invokes an ecological grammar to guide agricultural practice. The second is by engaging with what Joan Martínez-Alier calls “the ecology of the poor,” which is exemplified by social movements that resist “a food system that puts profit before life” (in the words of the 2015 International Forum for Agroecology in Nyéléni, Mali).
Poverty, Luxury, and Art.
Book Project: Matthew Whelan and Natalie Carnes.
Poverty, Luxury, and Art asks how Christians faithfully negotiate the excesses of art in a world of need. What role do extravagances like art have when people die of hunger and curable disease? What room do the demands of mercy leave for excess and that which does not feed the hungry or tend to the sick?
Religio Loci: Wordsworth’s Sacred Gardening in the ‘Guide to the Lakes’ and the 1810s. Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1810s, ed. E. Mason. Cambridge series on Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition.
Book Project: Josh King.
Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Green Victorian Christian Poetics. Cambridge History of Literature and Religion in English, general eds. Lori Branch and Regina Schwartz, Nineteenth-Century Section.
Book Project: Josh King.