"The study of modern Christian thought is important not only for understanding one major world religion; it is also crucial to the study of religion itself, including all the religions, in modern global society, since the issues first encountered by European Christian thinkers in the Enlightenment are the same ones facing all religions today."

Garrett Green Curriculum Vitae

Garrett Green
Class of '43 Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies

• History of Christian thought
• Modern religious thought
• The religious imagination
• Theological aesthetics
• Philosophy of religion

Since his retirement from full-time teaching in 2006 to devote more time to research and writing, Professor Green has continued to teach on a part-time basis: he offered a Freshman Seminar in the fall semester 2006 and Philosophy of Religion in spring 2007.

In the wider academic world, he recently completed two terms as Chair of the Nineteenth-Century Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion and is active in other national and international scholarly organizations, including the Society for the Study of Theology (UK), the American Philosophical Association, the Duodecim Theological Society, the New Haven Theological Discussion Group, and the Karl Barth Society of North America. In June 2008 he will be one of three principal lecturers at a two-week international seminar for doctoral students at the University of Marburg, Germany, as part of the interdisciplinary Projekt: Menchenbilder (Project on Images of the Human).

Professor Green's field encompasses the development of Christian thought from the early church to the present, though his main interests as a scholar and teacher lie in the modern period. Most of his research and writing has focused on European religious thought from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries up to the present. This period is especially important and fascinating because it has witnessed the encounter of traditional Christian faith and theology with the modern secular world.

Green is the author of Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (paperback ed. Eerdmans, 1998). In this work he explores the role of imagination necessary to the discovery of truth in the sciences, the arts, and religion and argues that the link between humanity and God is the imagination. He has also written Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2000), based on his Edward Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in England in 1998.

His most recent book is a translation, with a substantial introduction, of a work by the most influential Christian theologian of the twentieth century: Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion. He has also published numerous articles dealing with religious and secular thinkers of the modern period as well as theological issues confronting Christians and other religious people today - including the interpretation of scripture, feminist criticism, and religion and science. Professor Green's next research project will be in philosophical and theological aesthetics.

Green has extensive experience doing research and teaching abroad. He has held both Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships in Germany, spent a year as a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, in the UK, and directed the College's SATA programs in Mexico and Greece. In addition he has participated in faculty summer seminars and institutes in the U.S. sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Pew Charitable Trusts.