Mark D. Jordan

Richard Reinhold Niebuhr Research Professor of Divinity

Education

BA, St. John's College
MA, PhD, University of Texas at Austin

Profile

Mark D. Jordan is a scholar of Christian theology, European philosophy, and gender studies. He currently teaches courses on the Western traditions of Christian soul-shaping, the relations of religion to art or literature, and the prospects for sexual ethics.

Over the last three decades, Jordan has written extensively on sexual ethics, producing books that are widely regarded as opening important new conversations. But he has also continued to explore longstanding topics at the boundaries of philosophy and Christian theology. His latest book tells a brief history of the imagined scenes of theological education (Transforming Fire, Eerdmans 2021). He is at work on another manuscript about the neglected languages of queer spirituality.

Jordan has received a number of grants and fellowships, including a John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays grant (Spain), and a Henry Luce III Fellowship in Theology. With support from the Ford Foundation, he led a seminar on public debates about religion and sexuality for rising scholars from the United States and abroad. In 2019, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Jordan retired from active teaching duties at HDS in 2021 and is now working as a research professor.