Established in 2004 to honor Dr. Martin E. Marty, former Chair of the St. Olaf College Board of Regents and the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, this chair symbolizes what it means to live and work at the intersection of faith and reason. It provides opportunities both to address significant religious issues within the Church and the academy at large and to respond in a thoughtful and faithful way to wider cultural issues.
The Martin E. Marty Chair in Religion and the Academy fosters ongoing dialogue that explores the intersection between significant religious and cultural issues and St. Olaf’s role as a liberal arts college of the church.
Current chair: Kiara A. Jorgenson
Kiara recently published Ecology of Vocation: Recasting Calling in a New Planetary Era (Fortress/Lexington, 2020) and an edited volume, Ecotheology: A Christian Conversation (Eerdmans, 2020). She has published in a variety of journals on interdisciplinary topics ranging from Jürgen Moltmann’s ecological ethics to the vocation of children to Indigenous influence on Christian watershed liturgies. Kiara is currently working on two book projects, an ecotheological constructive reading of Martin Luther’s anthropology for the Cascade series “Reconstructions in Lutheran Doctrinal Theology” and a popular work on nature, wonder, and the spiritual questing of children.
Her research interests include: Protestant ecotheologies, vocation, ecofeminisms, agrarian studies, ecological resistance movements, childhood studies, and the theology of motherwork. She teaches religion courses on ecotheologies, place-based spiritualities, and a smattering of environmental humanities offerings such as Biophilia, Theo-Ethics of Climate Change, and Culture of Nature.