Debbie Wong
Debbie Wong came to Duke Divinity for her Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree with a passion for leading worship and no intention of pursuing doctoral studies. “I hadn’t realized that contemporary praise and worship could be the subject of serious scholarly work, but I met Professor Lester Ruth and was introduced to a whole new world,” Wong said.
“Duke is one of the few places where such work is being done, and I applied to the Th.D. program to study the history, development and theology of contemporary praise and worship, with a particular eye toward Southeast Asia (where I’m from).”
Jackson Adamah
The Duke Th.D. program is intentionally interdisciplinary, and students have access to the resources of both the wider university and partner institutions, including UNC–Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University, and N.C. State University. That interdisciplinary emphasis was a particular draw for Jackson Adamah.
“The program is a natural fit for my admittedly wide-ranging but interwoven interests in early Christian theology, political theology, eco-theology, missiology, and African Christianity. I am originally from Ghana, and my project touches on issues of human and creational flourishing in Sub-Saharan Africa. ”
Adamah names professors Luke Bretherton, Edgardo Colón-Emeric, Warren Smith, and Norman Wirzba as faculty who will advise and support his scholarship. “My research, which can be broadly conceived as a ressourcement of both the broader Christian tradition and traditional African ideas of human and creational flourishing, is at the intersection of many areas in my primary concentration of theology and ethics, and my secondary concentration of world Christianity.”
Brett Stonecipher
The interdisciplinary opportunities at Duke also attracted Th.D. student Brett Stonecipher, who is pursuing research in theology, poetry, and ecology.
“My interests center on theology and poetry: namely, how poems and poetic practice help us to see the world as creation and one another as creatures,” Stonecipher said. “What I’m really interested in is particularity—ways that poetry can help, in and through language, to create a simultaneous sense of kinship and difference. These simultaneous senses are of great theological interest to me because of a long tradition of considering the Holy Spirit as the Person who unifies and/or individuates.
"These dual senses are also of political interest—the question being how do we take our localized ways of thinking and speaking (which are gifts, I think) and make them intelligible to one another? There’s a pressure point here given our ecological moment, and I think that poetry might have things to teach us about developing a common understanding even amid uncertainty.”
In addition to working with professors Jeremy Begbie, Lauren Winner, and Norman Wirzba in the Divinity School, Stonecipher is studying with faculty in Duke’s English department.
Luke Oliver
Duke’s Th.D. program boast a superb placement rate, with graduates working at institutions such as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, Baylor University, Loyola University Chicago, and many more. These placements reflect the way that scholarly training at Duke Divinity is interwoven with an ethos of service to the church.
This was the environment that Luke Oliver, Th.D. candidate in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, wanted for his doctoral studies: “I see my scholarship as part of a vocational call to serve God’s people and believe that by pursuing this degree and this research, I am in fact doing ministry as I (hopefully) help to push the community of faith to a deeper connection with Christ and a more true reading and understanding of the Bible.”
