Dr. Willemien Otten is the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

In this conversation we discuss:

How Dr Otten became a medievalist
What is missed by skipping church history between Augustine, Aquinas, to Luther
What Augustine gets right about sex and bodies
How it took to the 12th century before Priests were really celibate
The role of scripture in Medieval culture
The origin of the doctrine of Creation out of Nothing
How the revival of Bonaventure and the Franciscan tradition is generating a more lively account of nature
How theology changes when the doctrine of nature is more than the canvas of salvation history
Why Dr. Otten finds the Barthian rejection of natural theology unconvincing
The role of nature for theological reflection in a secular age
The problem of Protestantism doctrine of stewardship
How to talk about books you havent read and become a strategic non-reader
Returning to Schleiermacher without Barthian blinders
The unique gift of the American philosophical tradition and its religious naturalism
Why more theologians need to read Emerson
Whats the role of the received tradition for contemporary constructive theology?

Willemien 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.

Her co-edited volume Religion and Memory (Fordham, 2013; with Burcht Pranger and Babette Hellemans) addresses how best to conceive the pastness of religion. Her co-edited volume Eriugena and Creation (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 Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (Oxford, 2013) and with Susan Schreiner she co-edited Augustine Our Contemporary. Examining the Self in Past and Present (Notre Dame, 2018).

Reflecting her interest in natural theology beyond the medieval period, Ottens latest study Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford, 2020) approaches ideas of nature and human selfhood 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, Otten draws attention to a more elusive idea of nature in which nature is an ally and co-worker of the divine

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