From beginning to end, the God attested in Scripture is a God who calls people wherever they are, through various means, and sets them a task or a quest that gives their life a definitive shape and course, a divine curriculum vitae. This vocational pattern, evident in each student who makes their way to Duke Divinity School, holds equally for the faculty members called to this place at this time for the good work of preparing these students to serve in the church, academy, and world. We see this pattern in the vocational stories of these four faculty members joining or stepping into a new role at Duke Divinity School for the 2025–2026 academic year.
Nina Balmaceda
Irene and William McCutchen Associate Professor of the Practice of Reconciliation; Director of the Center for Reconciliation
Though new to the faculty, Vilma “Nina” Balmaceda has been an essential member of the Duke community since joining the Divinity School in 2020, serving as the associate director of the Center for Reconciliation in recent years.
Her story, and the quest that led her to Duke, began in her native country of Peru. The grandchild of immigrants to Peru, Balmaceda lived through an era of internal armed conflict. “When I was a teenager, you could not walk by the corners where we have the kiosks with printed newspapers without seeing these terrible images of violence taking place in the country,” she says. “On the one hand, being a very faithful Christian, going to church every Sunday, studying the word of God in community—that was one image. But the country, the daily life, painted a very different picture.”
As a way of trying to address what was happening in her country, Balmaceda headed to law school to study human rights law. And "as much as I appreciated my alma mater, the Catholic University of Peru," and it was “good to know how to use the law,” Balmaceda says, “that didn’t seem enough to contribute to making the country less violent.” So in her mid 20s she headed to the U.S. to study international peace at the University of Notre Dame.
Balmaceda’s studies in Peru and at Notre Dame provided a very relevant “leg” in the pursuit of a just peace. “I have the best memories of my alma mater in the United States—very rigorous education, extremely diverse in terms of professors and fellow students from all around the world," she says.
When she began leading a United Nations project back in Peru after leaving Notre Dame, “I realized the great importance that the experiential dimension of faith and theological imagination can bring to peacebuilding efforts,” says Balmaceda. “When you travel around the world, you see that for so many people, the only reason they find the strength to get up the next day is because of their faith. The work of peacebuilding should not be compartmentalized from that. Many Christians do not make the inherent connection between answering to the calling to embrace the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth and cultivating just peace in the world. I hope we at Duke Divinity can contribute to make that bridge, to invite people to rethink what our role as Christians is.”
Keeping these two legs moving in step together remains a core element of Balmaceda’s work as a scholar-practitioner. “That connection between the scholarly effort, the deep reflection about what is happening, about what God teaches us through the Bible and in other ways, needs to be tied, go hand in hand with being with communities who suffer, being with survivors, learning from them," she says. "What have they learned from the terrible things that happened to them? And yet they still hold on to faith.”
Balmaceda believes churches can play a vital role in building a just peace, but it will require the courage to swim against prevailing currents. “I really think that the church has much to offer in the sacred task of cultivating peace,” she says. “But I’m afraid that right now in many churches we are always in an echo chamber of reaffirming what we already believe and think instead of being courageous enough to engage in meaningful discussions.”
For Balmaceda, few places are as well-resourced to aid the church in this reflective and practical work as Duke Divinity School. “What I dream of,” she says, “is that Duke Divinity can become the leading center for practically grounded, explicit and very robust theological reflection for conflict transformation and reconciliation.”
“Duke Divinity is a very special community. I think that one of the things that Duke Divinity offers that few other places have, in my experience, is this opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary theological work. I’ve learned so much from formal theologians, and so many, if not every, colleague has so much to contribute to the theology of reconciliation in their own special areas of expertise. What they are researching and teaching are like pieces of a puzzle that make this mosaic of faith and theological thinking that is so fundamental to advance the cause of reconciliation in the world. We want the Center for Reconciliation to be a home for everyone at the Divinity School.”
Natalie Carnes
Professor of Theology
Natalie Carnes has made a career of being dissatisfied with stock responses and oversimplifications. And she got started young. “When I was 7,” she says, “my Sunday school teacher asked each of us to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. I crayoned myself behind a pulpit, because at the time I wanted to be ‘a teacher during the week and a pastor on the weekends.’ After praising the boy next to me for his desire to be a minister, my Sunday school teacher nervously surveyed my drawing and responded, ‘Girls can’t be pastors.’ She probably had no idea what to do with me. But that was the first time it had consciously occurred to me there might be things a girl couldn’t do.”
Today, Carnes works in three subfields of theology—systematic theology, feminist theology, and theology and the arts—and her latest book, Attunement, she says, was her “chance to work explicitly in all three subfields at once and also argue that these subfields are all related to one another. The questions at the heart of theology and the arts about how we perceive God and how God comes to us in our material existence are questions central to the heart of systematic theology, as is the anti-idolatry project that animates feminist theology as well as conversations in theological aesthetics. In Attunement, I get to display how feminism and aesthetics, these two subjects that have been seen as somewhat marginal to the ‘real’ work of systematics, actually speak to the core of the theological enterprise.”
This work, Carnes says, “follows closely previous work in my book Motherhood, which draws on my own maternal experiences to ask what Augustine’s Confessions might look like if it were written by a young mother.”
A second crucial moment of dissatisfaction for Carnes came in college, where she began as an applied mathematics for economics major. “In one economics seminar,” she says, “as I watched for the hundredth time my teacher drawing the indifference curve and saying, ‘This represents people’s motivations’—I thought, ‘No, it doesn’t! People are way more complicated than that!’ For me as an 18-year-old, it was the complicatedness of people that interested me. I wanted to dig into the way we can face and have faced life’s existential questions.”
Examining ways that complicated human beings face and deal with a complex and sometimes harrowing world also remains at the fore of Carnes’ work. She is currently revising a manuscript co-written with new faculty member Matthew Philipp Whelan about poverty and art. There, Carnes says, they are asking: “How is it Christians justify making, enjoying, and supporting the arts in a world where people die of unmet need? What demands does such a world place on art? What kind of art meets those demands?”
Carnes is also starting a project on creativity, where, she says, “I hope to develop a theological account of creativity that takes seriously the way it is receptive as well as active, communal as well as individual, nonhuman as well as human. Concepts central to creativity like creation and inspiration are important terms of art in theology, and I want to excavate the theological assumptions in our popular accounts of creativity and suggest a different direction our discussions and practices of creativity might go.”
“One of the things I love about being back here at Duke Divinity is the feeling of being part of a shared (if contested!) vision of education, a sense that we are part of a common project of intellectual and moral formation. What the historical studies scholars are doing matters to the theologians; what the theologians are saying matters for biblical studies scholars; what the biblical studies scholars are discovering matters for ministerial studies; and so on. That sense of a shared project is especially important at this moment in history, when it feels as if the entire world is engulfed in crisis. Amidst the catastrophes and possibilities of our present, I don’t want to feel siloed off in my own individual academic work. I want this sense of thinking together about how we pursue our vocations with integrity and train our students to do the same. I can’t think of a better place to do that than Duke Divinity.
“I’m excited to be part of conversations about what it means to be training people in a Divinity School today. What are the real needs we are serving and might serve? How can we equip our students to meet the world we find ourselves in? What does it mean to serve the church now?”
Jonathan Cat Tran
Professor of Theological Ethics
If coming to the U.S. from Vietnam as a war refugee at age 5 weren’t challenge enough, after becoming a Christian in his late teens, Jonathan Cat Tran was confronted with the need to put his world back together, to rethink everything from the inside out. “When you’re not raised Christian, your default position conceptually is not God,” he says. “And so you have all kinds of ways of explaining your existence and the existence of things without God. So when I became a Christian, it began to be about the work of explaining things in terms of God. In some sense, vocationally, what I’ve been doing is trying to make sense of the Christian life for the last 30, 40 years.”
And Tran has done that, in large part, by making a close study of everyday language and concepts, thereby following in the footsteps of his doctoral supervisor, Stanley Hauerwas. “Philosophy over the last 150 years,” he says, “has been fascinated with, focused on questions of language as ways of thinking about how we know things and experience the world. And the idea here is that our worlds are put together by concepts, that we know the world through concepts. Sometimes we wish we knew the world unmediated through concepts, as they used to say, things in of themselves. But we’re unique animals in that we speak the world through language, that we have the world through language. In the history of theology, that sometimes has been thought to be a problem. But I think theology helps us see that the way we’ve been put together as animals with language is actually an incredible gift.”
Though fraught and often intensely personal, Tran sees great promise in this painstaking work. “What I’ve tried to do in my work,” he says, “is to think about our human life in language and then think about the ways we speak about various things. Most centrally for me, of course, is Christian ethics. But if you think about specific ways of speaking ethically, like when we talk about race, if I say I’m an Asian American or you describe yourself as a white person or a black person, what do those concepts mean? Do we mean race as something essential to who we are? Do we mean it’s a description given to us by our society? These are all concepts laden with conceptual power and vulnerability. Same thing with concepts that are central to Christian doctrine or concepts that we use in church. If we go to church and we talk about being ‘on fire for the Lord,’ what does that mean? And how does it track across other speakers?”
Three projects Tran is currently working on closely align with the aims motivating his return to Duke: a book entitled Christianity and Race, which he’s co-writing with Vincent Lloyd, that is “trying to offer a generational statement on how we think about race as Christians”; Christianity and the Promise of Politics, which he’s co-writing with Hauerwas, that will take a fresh look at Plato’s Republic and classical political theory through the corpus of Hauerwas’ thought, thereby aspiring to offer a “generationally defining book on church and state”; and a book on the church that will encompass everything he’s been thinking about in terms of church research, “including the narrative about the death of American Christianity as the birth of the church in America.”
Three decades on from his conversion to Christianity, Tran can’t think of a better place to continue the perpetual rethinking and rearticulation that are part and parcel of our Christian lives in language. “These three projects will take up a lot of my time over the next few years, and I can’t imagine a better context for it—I mean, Duke as a university and the incredible intellectual resources the Divinity School has. I’m looking forward to being part of conversations that can inform the things I’m thinking about and what other people are thinking about.”
“Duke Divinity School is one of the very few places that is going to stake its life that there is a future for the church in America. And I thought if I can learn from and be a part of that, especially in the educating of divinity school students and in partnership with the broader church in America, that’s what I would like to spend the rest of my life thinking about.”
Matthew Philipp Whelan
Associate Research Professor of Theology
The roots of Matthew Philipp Whelan’s theological approach can be traced to three continents. He first became interested in theology in high school in the U.S. when he read the classic work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation. But Whelan had grown up in Zambia, where his father worked for USAID, laying the groundwork for the Famine Early Warning System Network, during a time of severe hunger in the region. “My experience there left me with a lot of questions about God, suffering, and providence,” he says. “Once we moved back to the U.S., much of what I heard at church and from others didn’t really grapple with realities like those I encountered in Zambia, but Gutiérrez did. What he had to say just made sense to me.”
Partly inspired by his father’s work, Whelan later entered the Peace Corps and worked alongside farmers in central Honduras trying to grow food on agriculturally marginal hillsides. Together, they pursued soil conservation techniques to try to prevent hillside erosion when the rains came.
During this time, Whelan started to see firsthand how ecologically destructive agriculture could be—but also how ecologically important good, sustainable agriculture was. “I developed a conviction that good agriculture can’t be just a privilege for the wealthy few but is a necessity for all of us,” he says.
His time in Honduras also raised important questions about why these impoverished families were on hillside land to begin with. “Why couldn’t they farm the flat, fertile valley lands below which were much more ideal for agriculture? An important part of the answer, of course, was their impoverishment and marginality within Honduran society.”
Although there’s more to his vocational story, “Honduras is where I first started making the kinds of connections that are at the heart of my scholarly work,” says Whelan, who works primarily at the intersection of ecological theology and ethics, liberation theology, Latin American theology, and Catholic social thought.
His award-winning book on Oscar Romero, Blood in the Fields, exemplifies this constellation of interests and angle of approach. It explores Romero’s role in one of the most explosive issues facing El Salvador during his time, the struggle over land. “He was guided by the belief that God gives creation as a common gift and that the goods of creation are meant for everyone,” Whelan says. “For Romero, land reform therefore wasn’t about ideology; it was about faithfulness to God’s will for the earth and ensuring that all people could share in God’s gifts, including land.”
Whelan’s most-recent book, Christianity and Agroecology, draws upon his time in Costa Rica, where he completed a master’s degree in agroecology and then worked for a time in the Bribri-Cabécar indigenous territories on the Costa Rica–Panama border.
Agroecology, as the term suggests, is an attempt to model agriculture on ecology and the rules and principles governing ecosystems. “For much agriculture today,” Whelan says, “the model isn’t ecology but industry, and the overriding focus is the maximization of production for profit. I’m interested in the development of what we might call an ecological and even agricultural ethic in Catholic social teaching. When Pope Francis in his landmark encyclical letter Laudato Si’ calls for models of production that mimic ecosystems in their circularity and in the way they absorb and reuse byproducts, he’s calling for something like agroecology. Christianity and Agroecology explores this convergence and tries to push Catholic social teaching’s agroecological ethic further.”
One of Whelan’s current projects, Why This Waste? Poverty, Art, and Witness, which he is co-writing with Natalie Carnes, steps away from his central area of work but not from his unshakeable conviction that theology must keep faith with the cries of the suffering. Emerging from years of conversation at the intersections of their respective disciplines, the book is especially interested in how Christians justify making, supporting, and enjoying art in a world where people die of unmet need. “How,” Whelan says, referring to Matthew 25 and 26, “do these two guidelines Christ lays down for Christian life – the work of mercy and the extravagance of the arts – relate to each other? Are there only tensions between them? Or does art for Christians play an important, even essential, role in a world of need?”
“For me, what brings me back [to Duke Divinity School] is that this has always been a community in which people are very serious about being Christians, and at the same time, they’re also serious about first-rate scholarship. There’s an integration of the life of the mind, as well as life in and for the world, that I think is rare. It’s also a place that, as seriously as it takes the Christian tradition, also sees the tradition as a living one that contributes to the life of the world and the pressing questions of the day. I think especially of what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel about the scribe who has become a disciple of God’s kingdom and brings what is new from what is old (13:52). That’s how I think of Duke Divinity School.
“And for me, the Divinity School also feels like a vocational alignment in more specific ways. There are so many certificate programs that align with my interests (Faith, Food, and Environmental Justice; Catholic Studies; Latinx Studies; etc.) in which I’m excited to teach. The Divinity School is committed to fostering thriving rural communities in North Carolina and elsewhere, a commitment in which I share. And beyond the Divinity School, there’s places like the Nicholas School of the Environment, the World Food Policy Center (run by our colleague Norbert Wilson), and the Kenan Institute of Ethics. And beyond these, Duke’s Climate Commitment is really exciting to me and something I hope to contribute to.”