Celebrating the paperback release of Dr. Demian Wheeler’s Religion Within the Limits of History Alone (SUNY Press, 2021), United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities is proud to invite members of the community to a special book event. On Thursday, November 11 at 11:45 AM CT, join us on campus or via livestream for a discussion and Q&A with Dr. Wheeler and special guest Dr. Sheila Greeve Davaney. United Dean Kyle Roberts and Rev. Andrea Johnson ('17) will also offer responses to the book. They will discuss the pragmatic historicism Dr. Wheeler advances in his book: a historicism which takes religion seriously as part of a changing, messy, temporal, fragile, diverse, and vibrant world. This pragmatic historicism invites us to reconstruct our theologies for our time and place.
For Dr. Wheeler, “To be a pragmatic historicist is to cultivate humility, gratitude, reverence, and metaphysical wonder. . . Most of all, to be a pragmatic historicist is to be at home in history, which is indeed the only home we have.”
Join us for a celebration of some of the exciting scholarship our faculty is producing, and participate in a lively discussion of important theological ideas.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Demian Wheeler is Associate Professor of Philosophical Theology and Religious Studies and Director of Advanced Studies at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. He came to United in 2015 as a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, where he specialized in American liberal theology. Wheeler is the author of Religion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology (State University of New York Press, 2020) and the co-editor of Conceiving an Alternative: Philosophical Resources for an Ecological Civilization (Process Century Press, 2019). He has also written a number of journal articles and book chapters on religious naturalism, empirical theology, and process philosophy, among other topics. Wheeler is currently working on a book about pantheism and the problem of evil, with a particular focus on the Holocaust, the murder of George Floyd, the coronavirus pandemic, and the climate crisis. He lives in Minnesota with his wife, Victoria, and their son, Shailer.
Sheila Greeve Davaney is the Harvey H. Potthoff Professor of Theology Emerita at Iliff School of Theology. She taught Modern Western Thought at Iliff from 1980-2007. From 2007-2011 she was the Program Officer for Religion and Public Life at the Ford Foundation. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York and from 2012-2015, Davaney was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. She is the author or editor of eleven volumes and over forty academic articles. She is now retired and lives in Denver, Colorado. Davaney was Demian Wheeler’s master's advisor and served on his Ph.D. dissertation committee. Her work is prominently featured in Wheeler’s book, Religion within the Limits of History Alone.
