Facing Conflict / Making Peace:

Meditations On Activism

July 13, 2005

Reverend Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Ph.D.

The Reverend Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Ph.D., is the 11th President of Chicago Theological Seminary, where she has taught for 20 years.

Professor, theologian, author, clergywoman, speaker and activist, Dr. Thistlethwaite has devoted her career to addressing issues of violence and violation in both academic and public spheres. She works and writes in the area of contextual theologies of liberation, with special concern for people on the margins, including women. She has examined prostitution in Asia and the United States; spoken widely about the relationship between a community’s ways of thinking about God and its treatment of women; and tirelessly advanced strategies for resisting war and promoting peace.

Author or editor of twelve books, her works include Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States with Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock (Fortress, 1996) and Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside (Tenth anniversary edition, Orbis, 1999), co-edited with Mary Potter Engel. She has also contributed chapters to Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, edited by Glen Harold Stassen (Pilgrim, 1998) and Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics, and the New War, edited by Jon L. Berquist (Chalice, 2002).

Dr. Thistlethwaite has a Ph.D. from Duke University, a Masters of Divinity from Duke Divinity School and a B.A. from Smith College. She has been an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ since 1974.