Brite Adds New Professor of Pastoral Care, New Head of Carpenter Initiative
Rev. Emilie Casey to take on two new roles: Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care and Director of Brite’s Carpenter Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Justice
FORT WORTH, TX – After a months-long faculty search, today, Brite Divinity School welcomed Rev. Emilie Casey as the new Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care. She will also serve as the new Director of Brite’s Carpenter Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Justice. In her new role, Casey brings a combination of rigorous scholarship, pastoral wisdom, and deep attention to questions of justice and human flourishing.
“I am thrilled to join the faculty at Brite Divinity School as Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care and Director of the Carpenter Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Justice,” Casey said. “Brite’s commitment to preparing students for congregational ministry and prophetic witness in the world resonates with my own faith convictions. As a pastor and scholar, I look forward to working with students in a community where theological reflection and faithful action go hand in hand.”
Brite’s Dean and Executive Vice President, Rev. Dr. Shonda R. Jones said, “Emilie Casey’s work in pastoral theology and care challenges communities of faith to reckon honestly with the power dynamics that shape practices of care. She embodies the kind of teacher-scholar Brite seeks to join the faculty —someone whose teaching, research, and ministry are grounded in faithful action and prophetic imagination.”
Casey is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Her research brings queer studies, feminist thought, and critical theories of race to bear on the history of American Christianities and practices of pastoral care and ministerial formation. Casey’s first book project draws on the archives of clinical pastoral education – from 1920s-1950s – to trace how 20th-century theologies of care were reshaped by psychiatric and social scientific methods.
These approaches combined psychological expertise with older Protestant traditions of self-examination as a source of revelation, a combination that continues to shape how pastors are trained to administer care today. These seemingly progressive pedagogies, however, also produced norms that defined pastoral authority in contrast to psychiatric patients, reinforcing asymmetries along axes of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Out of these tensions between faithful hopes and unjust effects, her work reimagines theologies of revelation, selfhood, and healing.
She previously served as Director of Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School and on the ministry staff of University Church in Yale, and as pastor of Bethesda Lutheran Church in New Haven, Connecticut. She will soon complete a Ph.D. in Religion from Emory University, and she has earned a Master of Divinity and Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) from Yale Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Music (B.M.) from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
About Brite Divinity School
Founded in 1914, Brite Divinity School is one of the premier progressive theological institutions in the Southwest. Located on the Texas Christian University Campus in Fort Worth, Texas; Brite Divinity School prepares leaders by focusing on excellent scholarship, pastoral training, and spiritual development through ministerial and academic programs. Led by a transformative calling, Brite Divinity School seeks to educate and inspire people to serve God’s diverse world as leaders in churches, the academy, and public life.
About the Carpenter Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Justice
The Carpenter Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Justice promotes conversations about healthy sexuality, enhances ministries with diverse communities that include bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and gay persons, and provides sanctuary and encouragement for ongoing dialogue and justice-oriented practice.