Academic

Research Interests

• Luke-Acts Studies
• Biblical Exegesis and Hermeneutics
• Thematic Literary Analysis
• Historical-critical & Narrative-Critical methodology
• Christology and Kenotic Theology in Luke-Acts

Research Approach

My work reflects a consistent methodological instinct that I would describe as inductive narrative theology. Rather than stating a thesis propositionally and defending it, I let the argument emerge from the story’s own movement, trusting that if the reader follows the narrative carefully enough, the conclusion becomes inescapable. I’m aware that this mirrors Luke’s own method, and that’s not accidental — I write the way Luke narrates.

I read texts holistically rather than atomistically. I’m not interested in excavating individual verses for propositional content but in what a text does within a larger narrative arc — how a scene gains meaning from what preceded it and shapes what follows. The Emmaus Road doesn’t mean anything in isolation; it means what it means because of everything Luke has been building since chapter one.

I’m theologically serious in a way that resists purely historical-critical reduction. I use historical background — Greco-Roman context, first-century Jewish social realities, the political precarity of diaspora life — but always in service of theological claims about what God is doing in the narrative. The history illuminates the theological stakes; it’s never the point in itself.

I have a consistent instinct for the social and embodied dimensions of the text. Boundaries, meals, belonging, who gets included and excluded, what it costs to cross a line — these aren’t abstract categories. They’re felt realities, and that sensibility runs through both my christological and pneumatological arguments.

The through line connecting my work: I read Luke-Acts as a narrative in which divine identity is progressively disclosed through the relinquishment of power, and in which that disclosure creates an ever-expanding community of belonging. The Gospel establishes the pattern christologically. Acts extends it pneumatologically.

Education

Applying for PhD programs in New Testament for Fall 2027

Master of Arts in Bible (2026)
Luther Seminary: St. Paul, MN

Bachelor’s Degree (2009)
Central Bible College: Springfield, MO
Double Major: Bible and Pastoral Ministry

Presentations

MA Thesis

My thesis, completed and defended in 2026 with full marks, examines how the Holy Spirit functions in the Acts of the Apostles to legitimate the renegotiation of ethnic and ritual boundaries, opening the community to Gentile inclusion. The project employs narrative criticism, historical-critical analysis, and social identity theory in sustained conversation with one another — reading Luke’s carefully constructed story as theological argument, grounding that reading in the first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman world Acts inhabits, and analyzing how Luke deploys the Spirit’s boundary-crossing activity as a strategy of legitimation for the reconfiguration of communal belonging.