Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York is a private ecumenical liberal Christian seminary in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, affiliated with Columbia University. Columbia University lists UTS among its affiliate schools, alongside Barnard College and Teachers College. Since 1928, the seminary has served as Columbia's constituent faculty of theology. In 1964, UTS also established an affiliation with the neighboring Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Despite its affiliation with Columbia University, UTS is an independent institution with its own administration and Board of Trustees. UTS confers the following degrees: Master of Divinity (MDiv), Master of Divinity & Social Work dual degree (MDSW), Master of Arts in religion (MAR), Master of Arts in Social Justice (MASJ), Master of Sacred Theology (STM), Doctor of Ministry (DMin), and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).
Raymond Edward Brown was an American Sulpician priest and prominent biblical scholar. He was a specialist on the hypothetical Johannine community, which he speculated contributed to the authorship of the Gospel of John, and he also wrote studies on the birth and death of Jesus.
Liberal Christianity, also known as liberal theology and historically as Christian Modernism, is a movement that interprets Christian teaching by taking into consideration modern knowledge, science and ethics. It emphasizes the importance of reason and experience over doctrinal authority. Liberal Christians view their theology as an alternative to both atheistic rationalism and theologies based on traditional interpretations of external authority, such as the Bible or sacred tradition.
Géza Vermes, was a British academic, Biblical scholar, and Judaist of Jewish–Hungarian descent—one who also served as a Roman Catholic priest in his youth—and scholar specialized in the field of the history of religion, particularly ancient Judaism and early Christianity. He is best known for his complete translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English; his research focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Ancient Hebrew writings in Aramaic such as the Targumim, and on the life and religion of Jesus. Vermes was one of the most important voices in contemporary Jesus research, and he has been described as the greatest Jesus scholar of his time. Vermes' written work on Jesus focuses principally on the Jewishness of the historical Jesus, as seen in the broader context of the narrative scope of Jewish history and theology, while questioning and challenging the basis of the Christian doctrine on Jesus.
John F. Haught is an American theologian. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at Georgetown University. He specializes in Roman Catholic systematic theology, with a particular interest in issues pertaining to physical cosmology, evolutionary biology, geology, and Christianity.
Sister M. Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C.,, the "lady abbess of nun poets", was the third President of Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana.
Gerhard Albert Baum, better known as Gregory Baum, was a German-born Canadian priest and theologian in the Catholic Church. He became known in North America and Europe in the 1960s for his work on ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, and the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews. In the later 1960s, he went to the New School for Social Theory in New York and became a sociologist, which led to his work on creating a dialogue between classical sociology and Christian theology.
Rosemary Radford Ruether was an American feminist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian known for her significant contributions to the fields of feminist theology and ecofeminist theology. Her teaching and her writings helped establish these areas of theology as distinct fields of study; she is recognized as one of the first scholars to bring women's perspectives on Christian theology into mainstream academic discourse. She was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and her own work was influenced by liberation and black theologies. She taught at Howard University for ten years, and later at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Over the course of her career, she wrote on a wide range of topics, including antisemitism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the intersection of feminism and Christianity, and the climate crisis.
David Frank Ford is an Anglican public theologian. He was the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, beginning in 1991. He is now an Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity. His research interests include political theology, ecumenical theology, Christian theologians and theologies, theology and poetry, the shaping of universities and of the field of theology and religious studies within universities, hermeneutics, and interfaith theology and relations. He is the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a co-founder of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.
Paul Francis Knitter is an American theologian. He is currently an emeritus professor at Union Theological Seminary, where he has served as the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture since 2007. He is also Emeritus Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he taught for 28 years before moving to Union. Knitter is known for his work on religious pluralism and multiple religious belonging, particularly regarding Buddhism and Christianity.
Margaret A. Farley is an American religious sister and a member of the Catholic Sisters of Mercy. She was Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School, where she taught Christian ethics from 1971 to 2007. Farley is the first woman appointed to serve full-time on the Yale School board, along with Henri Nouwen as its first Catholic faculty members. She is a past president of Catholic Theological Society of America.
Roger Haight is an American Jesuit theologian and former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He is regarded as a knowledgeable and pioneering theologian, whose experiences with censorship have led to widespread debate over how to handle controversial ideas in the Catholic church today.
Jane Dewar Schaberg was an American biblical scholar who served as Professor of Religious Studies and of Women's Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy from 1977 through 2009.
Gabriel Moran, AFSC was an American scholar and teacher in the fields of Christian theology and religious education. His writings made significant contributions to the development of Catholic theology in the years following the Second Vatican Council. His writings have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. He held the title of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Humanities and the Social Sciences at New York University, where he also served as the co-director of the Philosophy of Education Program.
Candida R. Moss is an English public intellectual, journalist, New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity, and as of 2017, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. A graduate of Oxford and Yale universities, Moss specialises in the study of the New Testament, with a focus on the subject of martyrdom in early Christianity, as well as other topics from the New Testament and early Church History. She is the winner of a number of awards for her research and writing and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue is an academic center that serves to build bridges between religious traditions, particularly between Catholic Christian and Jewish pastoral and academic leaders. The Center is a partnership between the Russell Berrie Foundation and the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum). It operates as part of the Section for Ecumenism and Dialogue in the Theology Faculty of the Angelicum in Rome.
Patricia (Pat) Reif, also known as Sister Richard,, was an American professor of philosophy and theology, known locally and nationally for her involvement in ecumenical issues, for her innovative leadership in the field of feminist spirituality and for her leadership in the Women's Ordination Conference. She was a founding member and leader of the ecumenical Immaculate Heart of Mary Community established in 1970 in Los Angeles as a result of irreconcilable differences between Cardinal James F. McIntyre over the implementation of Vatican II reforms. Along with the 455 vowed members of the canonical order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Reif was a leader in the development of the new community's innovative philosophical foundations. Most notably, in 1984, as chair of the religious studies department at Immaculate Heart College Center, she founded the nation's first graduate program in Feminist Spirituality.
Anne Estelle Patrick, SNJM, was an American Catholic religious sister, theologian, and professor. She was an active member of the Catholic Theological Society of America, the International Network of Societies for Catholic Theology, the Society of Christian Ethics, and the National Assembly of Women Religious.
Maryanne P. Confoy RSC is an Australian religious Sister of Charity who has also been a teacher and scholar, working primarily in the areas of ministry and spirituality.
Mary Milligan was an American theologian, a university administrator, and a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary (RSHM) who served as the tenth general superior of the Institute of the RSHM (1980–1985). She was the first general superior of that religious order who was born in the United States. In 1987, she was appointed by the Vatican as special secretary to the International Synod of Bishops on the Laity as one of three U.S. experts. While undertaking that task, she lobbied for a stronger role for women within the Catholic Church. She served Loyola Marymount University as a professor, as provost, and subsequently as Dean of Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. She went on to serve on the board of St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California, and taught theology to seminarians.
