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Dr. Willemien Otten is the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
\nIn this conversation we discuss:
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\nHow Dr Otten became a medievalist
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\nWhat is missed by skipping church history between Augustine, Aquinas, to Luther
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\nWhat Augustine gets right about sex and bodies
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\nHow it took to the 12th century before Priests were really celibate
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\nThe role of scripture in Medieval culture
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\nThe origin of the doctrine of Creation out of Nothing
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\nHow the revival of Bonaventure and the Franciscan tradition is generating a more lively account of nature
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\nHow theology changes when the doctrine of nature is more than the canvas of salvation history
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\nWhy Dr. Otten finds the Barthian rejection of natural theology unconvincing
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\nThe role of nature for theological reflection in a secular age
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\nThe problem of Protestantism doctrine of \u201cstewardship\u201d
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\nHow to talk about books you haven\u2019t read and become a strategic non-reader
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\nReturning to Schleiermacher without Barthian blinders
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\nThe unique gift of the American philosophical tradition and its religious naturalism
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\nWhy more theologians need to read Emerson
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\nWhat\u2019s the role of the received tradition for contemporary constructive theology?
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\nWillemien Otten studies the history of Christianity and Christian thought with a focus on the medieval and the early Christian intellectual tradition, especially in the West, and an emphasis on the continuity of Platonic themes. She analyzes (early) medieval thought and theology as an amalgam of biblical, classical, and patristic influences which, woven together, constitute their own intellectual matrix. Within this matrix the place and role of nature and humanity interest her most. She has worked on the Carolingian thinker Johannes Scottus Eriugena, on twelfth-century humanistic thinkers including Peter Abelard and, most recently, has ventured into the thought of R.W. Emerson and William James.
\nHer co-edited volume\xa0Religion and Memory\xa0(Fordham, 2013; with Burcht Pranger and Babette Hellemans) addresses how best to conceive the pastness of religion. Her co-edited volume\xa0Eriugena and Creation\xa0(Turnhout: Brepols, 2014; with Michael I. Allen), brings together selected papers on medieval nature. Besides her medieval work Otten maintains an active interest in Tertullian, Augustine, and the broader patristic tradition. With Editor-in Chief Karla Pollmann, she edited the three-volume\xa0Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (430\u20132000)\xa0(Oxford, 2013)\xa0and with Susan Schreiner she co-edited\xa0Augustine Our Contemporary. Examining the Self in Past and Present\xa0(Notre Dame, 2018).
\nReflecting her interest in natural theology beyond the medieval period,\xa0Otten\u2019s latest study Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford, 2020) approaches ideas of nature\xa0and\xa0human\xa0selfhood across a wide array of thinkers, from Augustine to William James and from Maximus the Confessor to Schleiermacher. Deconstructing the notion of pantheism in the Western religious tradition,