Dr. Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein to become new Assistant Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Theological Imagination
Brite Divinity School is excited to announce that, beginning August 1, Dr. Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein, who joined the faculty in 2019, will become Brite Divinity School’s first Assistant Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Theological Imagination. While she will maintain her position as a tenured faculty member (with a reduced teaching load), this new role will bring together Dr. Oredein’s unique gifts to help Brite respond creatively to the changing landscape of theological education.
“I am thrilled and honored to be at Brite in this new role!” shared Oredein. She continued, “I firmly believe that what I have seen created at Brite and what has the potential to emerge can spark novel and imaginative movement within theological education.” Dr. Stephen Cady, President of Brite Divinity School agrees, “Dr. Oredein is known and respected in Brite and beyond for her creativity, imagination, and her longing to help theological education meet the needs of Christian faith and practice in the 21st Century. We are so excited to see how God will use her gifts in this new role.”
As an educator, Oredein has explored pedagogical innovation in the classroom and in various other mediums - through the Wabash Center as a regular blog contributor and workshop participant, as a consultant and content panelist for the Louisville Institute, and as a webinar panelist and writer for the American Academy of Religion. She has led workshops for various churches, the Disciples Home Mission, and the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership.
A generator of diverse and new ideas, Oredein has created and been featured on podcasts and videos ranging from storytelling across differences, to feminist identity and religion, to honest conversations about Christian faith and practice. She believes these interests and her new role can help impress justice, imagination, and integrity into the future of theological education. In her words, “Being the Assistant Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Theological Imagination allows me the opportunity to co-imagine and co-innovate with the Brite community as well as with our partners and friends, individual communities, and connections to make things new and make new things! I am eager to walk with Brite into a new chapter where thoughtfulness and imagination meet and where care and creativity can be our calling card.”
Dr. Oredein currently serves as Associate Professor of Black Religious Traditions and Constructive Theology and Ethics. She was also the director of Black Church Studies. A graduate of the University of Virginia (B.A.) and Duke University Divinity School (M.Div. and Th.D.), her academic offerings are diverse. With scholastic and creative work engaging race, identity, and faith, theopoetics, liminality and theology, womanist theology and ethics, and postcolonial and decolonial thought Oluwatomisin has crafted theological poetry, creative writing pieces, critical writings, devotionals, pedagogical content, and academic articles about and for the academy and society. She has written one monograph, the inaugural Notre Dame Press First Time Author award-winning The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice, has co-edited Theopoetics in Color: Embodied Approaches to Theological Discourse through Eerdmans Press, and is author of the book in-process, The Care Book: A Theological Ethic of Care.