2022 Annual Karl Barth Conference

Plenary Speakers

Matthew Aragon Bruce

Matthew J. Aragon Bruce teaches in the Calvin Prison Initiative, a partnership between Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary that provides a Christian liberal arts education to inmates at the Richard A. Handlon Correctional Facility in Ionia, MI. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, MI. He holds an MDiv (2006) and PhD in the History of Christian Doctrine (2014) from Princeton Theological Seminary and an MTh from the University of Edinburgh (2007). His research focuses on Modern European Theology and Medieval Theology. He is the author of numerous book reviews and articles. He is currently working on a monograph titled Theology without Voluntarism: The Love and Freedom of the Creative Trinity in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. He is a candidate for the ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

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Brandon Gallaher

Brandon Gallaher is Senior Lecturer of Systematic and Comparative Theology at the University of Exeter (Devon, UK). His publications include Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), co-editor (with Paul Ladouceur) of The Patristic Witness of Georges Florovsky: Essential Theological Writings (London: T & T Clark-Bloomsbury, 2019) and co-editor (with John Chryssavgis) of The Living Christ: The Theological Legacy of Georges Florovsky (London-Bloomsbury: T & T Clark, 2021). His recent research focuses on ecclesiology, comparative theology, Sergii Bulgakov and Eastern Orthodoxy and modernity.

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Beverly Gaventa

Beverly Roberts Gaventa is Helen H.P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary.  Her publications include Our Mother Saint Paul (Westminster John Knox, 2007), The Acts of the Apostles (Abingdon, 2003), I and II Thessalonians (Westminster John Knox, 1998), Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus (University of South Carolina, 1995; Fortress, 1999), and From Darkness to Light: Aspects of Conversion in the New Testament (Fortress, 1986), and When in Romans: An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul (Baker Press, 2016). In 2020, Gaventa received the Burkitt Medal by the British Society for Arts and Humanities, an annual award in biblical studies rarely bestowed on an American scholar. In 2016 she was president of the Society of Biblical Literature, the largest professional organization of biblical scholars in the world. She has lectured widely in the U.S. as well as in Canada, Europe, South Africa, and Australia.  Dr. Gaventa is a ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and a member of the University Presbyterian Church, Austin, Texas.

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Kevin Hector

Kevin Hector is Professor of Theology and of the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 2007.  He is the author of two books, Theology without Metaphysics (2011) and The Theological Project of Modernism (2015), and has another one due out soon: Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology.  His next major project analyzes the relationship between memory, identity, and religious practices of self-narration.

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Keith Johnson

Keith L. Johnson is Professor of Theology at Wheaton College, where he also serves as the Director of Theological Integration at the Center for Faith and Innovation. He has authored and edited several volumes related to Barth, including The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, co-edited with George Hunsinger (Blackwell, 2020), The Essential Karl Barth: A Reader and Commentary (Baker Academic, 2019), and Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (2010). He currently is president of the Karl Barth Society of North America.

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Cambria Kaltwasser

Cambria Kaltwasser is assistant professor of theology at Northwestern College, Iowa, where she teaches courses in historical and systematic theology. Her research examines the relationship between Barth’s covenantal theology and his account of human agency as responsibility before God. Her wider interests include theological anthropology and Christian hope. Kaltwasser is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

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Adam Neder

Adam Neder is the Bruner-Welch Professor of Theology at Whitworth University. He is the author of Theology As a Way of Life: On Teaching and Learning the Christian Faith and Participation in Christ: An Entry Into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He teaches a wide range of popular courses and has been voted Most Influential Professor by a number of Whitworth senior classes.

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Paul Nimmo

Paul Nimmo holds the King’s (1620) Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen, having previously held positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. His own studies were undertaken in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Princeton, and Tübingen. His first monograph, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision, was awarded a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, and he has since published Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed, and co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology and the Oxford Handbook of Karl Barth. He is the Senior Editor of International Journal of Systematic Theology, and a Translation Fellow at the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Seminary. He is also a former co-Chair of the AAR Reformed Theology and History Group Steering Committee, and has served as the Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Theology. An ordained elder in the Church of Scotland, he participates actively in the life of the church at local and national levels, and is currently a member of the CPCE delegation for ecumenical dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church.

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Alexandra Pârvan

Dr. Alexandra Pârvan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pitești, Romania. She has degrees in Psychology (BSc) and Philosophy (MA, PhD) from the University of Bucharest and the Romanian Academy. Following her PhD dissertation (Problema răului în filosofia lui Augustin – The Problem of Evil in Augustine, 2008), she published on Augustine’s theory of evil, theory of knowledge, and biblical exegesis, and is a multiple entry contributor to the two major current tools of Augustine scholarship (Augustinus Lexikon, 1986- , and The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, 2013). In addition, her singular, systematic attempt to show the usefulness of Augustine’s ideas in clinical contexts led her to introduce a new field of investigation, called “metaphysical care”, through award-winning research (Prize for Excellence, European Society for Person Centered Healthcare, London, 2018). Her publications cover expertise in fields such as: patristics, early medieval studies, philosophical theology, philosophy of culture, art theory, philosophy of medicine, philosophy and psychotherapy, arts and humanities in medicine. She published the monograph Dublul și diferența (The Double and the Difference, 2004) and two poetry books (2001, 2013). She is a multi-award and prize-winning poet.

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Rinse Reeling Brouwer

Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer is Professor Emeritus on the Miskotte/Breukelman Chair for Theological Hermeneutics of the Bible at the Protestant Theological University (Amsterdam) and was senior Lecturer in the History of Christian Doctrine at the Protestant Theological Faculty (Kampen and Groningen). Besides his edition of Frans H. Breukelman, The Structure of Sacred Doctrine in Calvin’s Theology (ET 2009) and textbooks on Calvin (2004) and the History of Systematic Theology (2009), he published books on Karl Barth and Marxism (1988), Spinoza and Reformed Theology (1998), and Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy (2015). From 2009 till 2019 he was (co-)editor of the Journal of Dialectical Theology and coordinated the cooperation of Protestant Theological University with the Karl Barth Center of Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Michelle Sanchez

Michelle C. Sanchez is associate professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School where she teaches courses on the Protestant Reformations, Protestant theologies, critical theories of modernity, and theories and methods on the study of religion. Her first book, Calvin and the Resignification of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2019) performs a close reading of Calvin’s 1559 Institutio in conversation with theories of embodiment, practice, political theology, and secularization. She is drafting her second book, tentatively titled “Thinking God’s Thoughts”: Power, Imagination, and the Invention of Worldview Christianity, which will examine the theological adaptation of “worldview” by late nineteenth-century Neo-Calvinists, with an eye to its anthropological, cultural, and political impact.

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Katherine Sonderegger

Katherine Sonderegger holds the William Meade Chair in Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary where she has taught since 2002.  Prior to her service at Virginia, she taught for 15 years at Middlebury College in Vermont.  Kate is a priest of the Episcopal Church, resident in the diocese of Virginia.  She is also at work on a Systematic Theology, two volumes of which have appeared (Fortress Press 2015, 2020) and a third on the Missions of the Divine Persons is underway.  Karl Barth has been a guiding influence on her theology since divinity school days.

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Thomas Joseph White, OP

Fr. Thomas Joseph White is the Rector Magnificus of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas (Angelicum) in Rome. He is the author of various books and articles including Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Sapientia Press, 2011), The Incarnate Lord, A Thomistic Study in Christology (The Catholic University of America Press, 2015) Exodus (Brazos Press, 2016),The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (Catholic University Press, 2017), and The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Catholic University Press, 2022). He is co-editor of the journal Nova et Vetera, a Distinguished Scholar of the McDonald Agape Foundation, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

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