Biography

Emilie Casey is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care and Director of the Carpenter Initiative on Gender, Sexuality, and Justice. 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 (1920s-1950s) to trace how twentieth-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.

Casey is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). 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 holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Emory University, an M.Div. and S.T.M. from Yale Divinity School, and a B.M. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.