Disciples Divinity House

Four new persons joined the ranks of Disciples Divinity House Scholars beginning in the 2014-15 academic year.

Joel A. Brown enters the PhD program in Religions in America. He comes with a ThM degree from Brite Divinity School, where his thesis treated three Dallas-Fort Worth area seminaries and their response to the Civil Rights movement. He writes, “My research interests took new shape as a result of better understanding the complexity and diversity within American religious historical scholarship today." He received the Disciples of Christ Historical Society’s Isaac Errett Award for his paper on Alexander Campbell’s views on race and class, and he is the author of “Concern for the Poor in the Nashville Bible School Tradition: David J. Lipscomb and James A. Harding,” Restoration Quarterly (2013). He is a 2009 summa cum laude BA graduate and a 2012 summa cum laude MDiv graduate of Abilene Christian University. He grew up in Oregon and is the child of ministers. He and his spouse, Erin James-Brown, were part of the leadership team of Galileo Christian Church, a new Disciples congregation in Mansfield, Texas.

Mark M. Lambert returns to pursue a PhD in Theology, having received his MA from the Divinity School in 2013 as a Disciples House Scholar. He served as House Council President in 2012-13. He is interested in leprosy and its stigma as “stubborn sections of the symbolic structure of Christianity, and potent parts of religious parlance. … [W]hen a bodily and medical condition becomes culpable in the sway of one’s social status, the result is a value-laden landscape which I believe theology is best equipped to navigate.” He is a 2010 magna cum laude BA graduate of Truman State University, where he majored in Philosophy & Religion (with Honors) and was selected as the department’s Outstanding Undergraduate Student. He was elected to Theta Alpha Kappa (Religion) and Eta Sigma Phi (Greek and Latin) honorary societies. In 2011, he was honored for “Best Undergraduate Paper” at the Midwest AAR meeting for “Baldwin IV: a Curious Case of Leprosy in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” and he presented a paper at the 2013 SBL meeting.

Virginia Johnston White enters the MDiv program. She is a 2013 magna cum laude BA graduate of Rice University, where she majored in Sociology and History and earned departmental honors and the University’s highest research prizes. She worked with Rice's Religion and Public Life Program as an undergraduate and then post-baccalaureate research fellow, managing the “Religious Understandings of Science” study funded by the Templeton Foundation. Her undergraduate thesis examined African American Protestants’ views of science education. She has co-authored review articles and presented academic papers. She was a HELM Fellow, a volunteer writing tutor, an intern at the Journal of Feminist Economics and at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy, and leader of student groups; she studied abroad in London and participated in the NCC’s Young Women’s Leadership Experience at the UN. She writes: “I understand ministry as an act aimed toward revolutionizing communities toward positive change, focused on caring for others even when it is difficult, and acknowledging the dual brokenness and potential for good in all persons.” A life-long Disciple and “preacher’s kid,” her home church is University Christian, Austin, Texas.

“Van” VanBebber enters the AMRS program to explore long-standing interests in religion and next steps in his second career. He reflects that, as the child of a minister, he has long been deeply interested in “that which my Dad and family committed their entire lives, with the concomitant sacrifices, in the care and education of others in the service of their beliefs…. In my case, [following those interests] traveled the circuitous path through prior academic and professional pursuits....” Van earned the BS and MS in Business and Accounting at the University of North Texas, graduating summa cum laude. In 1993 he earned a JD at Columbia University with Stone Scholar honors, where he was a Stone Moot Court Semi-Finalist, served on the Human Rights Law Review, Law Revue show cast, Columbia-Harlem Tutorial Program, and Reunion Committee. Later, he was elected an equity partner in the Trial and Litigation Section of the Dallas firm, Hughes & Luce, LLP. He has served as an adjunct professor in law and in business. He was active in the Dallas Bar Association, especially in its mentoring program for at-risk Dallas public school children. He left law practice to pursue a PhD at UNT in Interdisciplinary Information Science, which he received earlier this year.