Kathryn Tanner


Kathryn Eileen Tanner is Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School.

Biography

Born March 29, 1957, Tanner earned her BA, MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Yale University. Her career began at Yale by teaching for the department of religious studies. She later moved to the University of Chicago where she served as the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology. Afterwards, she returned to teach at her alma mater.
Tanner does constructive Christian theology in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Her work addresses contemporary challenges to the Christian faith through the creative use of both the history of Christian thought and interdisciplinary methods, such as critical, social, and feminist theory. Her first book, God and Creation in Christian Theology developed an account of the non-competitive relations between God and creatures. Her next book The Politics of God applies non-competitive relations to the political sphere. Her book Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology explores the relevance of cultural studies for rethinking theological method. She has also written a short systematic text on the Incarnation and a text on the economic relevance of Christian beliefs about God. Christ the Key, argues for the centrality of Christ in all theological questions. Her latest book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism pulls together some of her previous discussions on economy and theology and discusses the moral, social, and theological concerns with present day "finance-dominated capitalism" and how Christian theology offers better alternatives.
She is a past president of the American Theological Society and is active in the Episcopal Church. She is a member of the Theology Committee that advises the Episcopal House of Bishops.
She is on the editorial boards of Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and Scottish Journal of Theology.
Tanner delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2007 and the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, which became her 2019 book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism.

Publications