Faculty/Author Talk at STH Library: Kathryn House

Kathryn House is a PhD candidate in Practical Theology at Boston University School of Theology. Her dissertation reconsiders Christian identity in light of intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in US-American evangelical campaigns for sexual purity. Analyzing women's writings across three centuries, she asks how Christian identity is connected to soteriological imagination and recast in terms of purity. Kathryn gives critical attention to the Moral Reform movement of the 1830s and 1840s, to lynching and anti-lynching campaigns at the turn of the 20th century, and to women's challenges to the legacies of 1990s evangelical purity culture. Interrogating the wedding of whiteness and purity in these campaigns, she queries the possibility of baptism as a counter-practice to the implications of these intertwined symbolics. She is the author of “Torture and Lived Religion: Practices of Resistance” in Trauma and Lived Religion: Transcending the Ordinary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and “Sometimes, the Minister is a Girl,” in Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay (White Cloud Press, 2015). She has also contributed to the Feminism and Religion blog. Kathryn is the Assistant Director of the Center for Practical Theology here at STH, where she is currently inspired by and coordinating Creative Callings. She is ordained in the Alliance of Baptists and American Baptist Churches USA, and is a member of The First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, MA.