Katherine Turpin

Bio

Katherine Turpin joined Iliff’s faculty in June 2002. She also currently serves as Associate Dean for Curriculum and Assessment and Director of the MDiv program.

Interests in how people learn and critically engage with religious traditions, how they disrupt formation into the assumptions and practices of dominant culture, and how they navigate the politics of knowing in diverse communities inform Katherine Turpin’s work in religion education and practical theology. She also encourages doctoral students and early career faculty to develop agency and artistry in their teaching lives. Her current research interests include how histories of oppression and structural inequality inform the identity of white women and unlearning and disrupting white supremacy in the practices of education and theological reflection.

Dr. Turpin’s publications include Questioning Our Faith in Practice: Unlearning White Supremacy in Practical Theology (forthcoming), Drama Tweens: Engaging the Bible with Younger Adolescents (Wipf and Stock 2016), co-authored with Anne Carter Walker Nurturing Different Dreams: Youth Ministry Across Lines of Difference (Pickwick Press, 2014), and Branded: Adolescents Converting from Consumer Faith, (Pilgrim Press, 2006).

“In recent years I have enjoyed teaching first-year students in the interdisciplinary seminars as they begin to explore what it means to engage challenges critical to our lives together such as ecological devastation through various theological disciplines. That integrative, collaborative, searching work for justice and healing in our lives together is at the heart of what we do at Iliff, and I like to be there right at the start.”

Representative courses:
Teaching and Learning in the Community of Faith
Practical Theology
Education and Social Change
Pedagogy and the Teaching of Religion
Food, Faith, and the Land