Faculty Profile

Education: BA, Wheaton College, 1985; MA, Wheaton Graduate School, 1986; MDiv, Fuller Theological Seminary, 1995; PhD, Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, 1995. At SPU since 1996.

Dr. Marcia Webb has taught a wide variety of psychology courses for both graduate and undergraduate students. Her scholarship focuses on understanding religious stigma toward psychological disorders. Her article “Toward a Theology of Mental Illness” outlines some of the problems with this stigma and offers preliminary ideas about alternative theological approaches toward mental illness.

Dr. Webb is also interested in suffering as a theological construct, and its relation to the psychological study of stress, trauma, and post-traumatic growth. As part of this scholarship, she also studies anger toward God, from both a theological and a psychological perspective. Her article “The Book of Job: A Psychologist Takes a Whirlwind Tour” considers these areas of scholarship as they apply to the story of the biblical character Job.

​Selected publications

Webb, M. (in press). Depression and Christian voluntarism: Examining freedom from the perspective of psychological science. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology.

Webb, M. (2015). The Book of Job: A psychologist takes a whirlwind tour. Christian Scholars’ Review, 44 (2), 155–74.

Webb, M. (2014). “Forgiving” God: Reflections on psychological research describing spiritual struggle. Theology Today, 71 (3), 337–346. doi: 10.1177/0040573614542310

Webb, M. (2012). Toward a theology of mental illness. Journal of Religion, Disability, & Health, 16 (1), 49–73. doi:10.1080/15228967.2012.645608

Webb, M., Charbonneau, A.M., McCann, R.A., & Gayle, K.R. (2011). Struggling and enduring with God, religious support, and recovery from severe mental illness. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67 (2), 1161–76. doi: 10.1002/jclp.20838

Please view Dr. Webb’s CV (PDF) for additional publications.