This fund, first established in 1988, has reached the spending goal of $1.5M. The professorship is to honor Harold Ditmanson, Professor of Religion. Harold H. Ditmanson retired in 1986 after 40 years on the faculty of St. Olaf College. His impact on the lives, self-understanding, and religious convictions of students has been significant over the years. “Ditt” had the unique ability to integrate intellectual and theological issues with literature, ethics, and history in such a way as to give credibility to the religious understanding. He assisted students in nurturing that religious understanding and interfaith comprehension of religious questions into a mature faith and life, enriched by the values of a liberal arts education. The “Harold Ditmanson Chair of Religion” will support a faculty member who is a distinguished scholar of the Lutheran tradition as personified in the career of Dr. Ditmanson. Previous Ditmanson chairs include L. DeAne Lagerquist (Religion).
Current Chair:
Gregory Walter, Professor of Religion.
Gregory Walter was born in Fairmont, Minnesota and graduated from Fairmont High School. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from St. Olaf College. In the fall of his first year, while wandering in the St. Olaf Bookstore, he noticed and bought the second volume of Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology and could not put it down. As an undergraduate, Walter studied theology, literature, and philosophy in an important semester in St. Olaf’s Paracollege.
Walter went on to study at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, taking an MDiv degree there. He served a year of pastoral internship at Goodridge, Minnesota in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) Horizon internship program. He then studied for a PhD, completing a dissertation in systematic theology on the Luther Renaissance under Dr. Bruce L. McCormack at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. Walter investigated the return to Martin Luther’s thought that took place in Germany’s Weimar Era, evaluating its effects on the theological interpretation of Jesus. He received the PhD in 2006, having started teaching at St. Olaf College in the previous academic year.
Walter’s work has engaged in conversations on theological rationality, hermeneutics, divine love, and interreligious theology, which have been published in various theological journals and as chapters in edited volumes and scholarly yearbooks. He has also contributed to the scholarship on the work of several figures: Martin Luther, Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Holl, Hans-Joachim Iwand, and Paul Tillich. He published his first monograph, Being Promised: Theology, Gift, and Practice (2013), which considered promise as a form of gift-exchange and developed a theology of place. He is currently working on two projects. The first is a long-term project reconstructing theology as a form of inquiry in conversation with pragmatism and critical social theory. The second further develops the discussion of place from Being Promised in considering the topology of Jesus’ crucifixion.