I came to Iowa in 2003 from George Washington University, where I worked as a research associate in a public policy think tank. As a graduate of a small liberal arts college, I knew early on that I wanted to teach at a place like Simpson, where real mentoring relationships between faculty and students are possible, and where questions of meaning play a key role in the educational experience.

I teach courses in systematic and moral theology, as well as a Great Books course in the Western tradition. I have broad, varied interests in the field. My dissertation addressed the meaning of Jewish suffering for Christian moral theology after the Holocaust, a subject I have continued to study through an NEH seminar on medieval Jewish-Christian relations at Oxford University’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and two faculty seminars at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I have done work on church-state relations and political theory, including research on the implications of free speech for the protection of children. My recent research centers on the theological and political implications of seventeenth-century radical Calvinism. I also have interests in religion and culture, and while at Simpson I have taught courses on vampires, superheroes, witchcraft, and the devil.