The 2013 Winifred E. Weter Lecture

Youth, Faith, and the Christian University after Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: A Reassessment of the National Study of Youth and Religion Findings in Light of Walter Brueggemann's The Creative Word

Jeffrey Keuss, PhD

Professor of Christian Ministry Theology, and Culture
Associate Dean of Seattle Pacific Seminary

Tuesday, April 9, 2013, 7:30 p.m.
Upper Gwinn Commons, SPU Campus

Lecture incorporates live music, dance, and painting by SPU students and local artists.

Refreshments following.

Jeffrey Keuss, holds a BA in English and psychology from SPU, an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary and a PhD in English literature, theology, and cultural study from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He has published articles, chapters and reviews on the interdisciplinary engagement of theology, literature, and contemporary culture and is the North American general editor for the journal Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press) as well as on the advisory board for The Other Journal. He is the author of A Poetics of Jesus: The search for Christ through writing in the nineteenth century, The Sacred and the Profane: Contemporary Issues in Hermeneutics, Freedom of the Self: Kenosis, Cultural Identity and Mission at the Crossroads, and Your Neighbor’s Hymnal: What popular music can teach us about faith, hope and love (Cascade, 2011). He also has two chapters in Cinema Divinite addressing the role of film studies in theological reflection in the work of director Stanley Kubrick. Dr. Keuss is active in the local arts community and a regular panelist on The Kindlings Muse, a monthly live podcast addressing topics of pop culture, creativity, and the arts in relation to faith. 

In the 2013 Winifred E. Weter Lecture, Dr. Keuss will reflect on the 10-year anniversary of one of the most influential ongoing research projects in recent memory to assess the nature of faith formation of young people. The effects upon faith communities as a result of the data collected by the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), first begun in 2002 and later published by Christian Smith and Melinda Denton in 2005 as Soul Searching, have been profound. This lecture will review the outcomes drawn from the NSYR data in light of a more sustained biblical and theological reflection on what faith formation in young people should and could be. To this end, the lecture will present what practical theologian Stephen Pattison calls a "critical conversation" with these outcomes in relation to the proposed canonical model of faith formation offered by Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann throughout his oeuvre, but with particular attention given to his educational mandates found in The Creative Word: Canon As A Model for Biblical Education.

For more information visit the Weter Lecture webpage.