David P. Gushee


David P. Gushee is a Christian ethicist and public intellectual.

Work and membership

David P. Gushee has been the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Faith and Public Life at Mercer University since 2007. He was formerly the Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy and the Senior Fellow of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Christian Leadership at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.
Gushee was elected in 2015 Vice President and 2018 Vice President of the American Academy of Religion. In January 2016 he was elected President-Elect of the Society of Christian Ethics. He is a columnist for Religion News Service in Washington.
Gushee served as president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, an organization advocating for an end to torture, especially that sponsored by the United States government; this organization has since become the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. He was a columnist for the Associated Baptist Press and was a columnist for Christianity Today from 2005 to 2007. Gushee has also served on The Constitution Project's Detainee Treatment Task Force since December 2010. He helped draft the Evangelical Climate Initiative's Call to Action. He serves on the Sojourners board of directors.

Scholarship and recognition

Gushee is an internationally recognized Holocaust scholar and ethicist, based on his 1994 book Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. He was appointed in 2008 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to serve as a member of the Church Relations and the Holocaust Committee. He taught a summer seminar for college faculty at the USHMM.
Gushee's most important books include Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, and Changing Our Mind. Kingdom Ethics was Christianity Today's Theology/Ethics Book of the Year for 2004, and has been translated into eight languages. A second edition was released in 2016.
Gushee is the author of well over one hundred scholarly articles, chapters and reviews and has written or edited twenty books.
Gushee was ordained to the Gospel Ministry at Walnut Hills Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1987.
He has received the Evangelical Press Association's Christian Journalism Award for 1991, 1992 and 1997, recognition of excellence in opinion writing.
Gushee was granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in May 2009 by the John Leland Center for Theological Studies.

Education

Gushee received his Ph.D. in Christian ethics from Union Theological Seminary in 1993, having earned his M.Phil. from Union Theological Seminary in 1990. Gushee earned his M.Div. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1987. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. from the College of William and Mary in 1984.

Controversy

As a Christian ethicist, Gushee has periodically been out spoken about current controversial societal topics. His positions on such issues as climate change, torture, and LGBT rights have often put him into conflict with his traditional evangelical constituency. For example, In 2015, Russell Moore, also a well known Evangelical ethicist, implied that Gushee was not a true Evangelical because of his change of belief supporting LGBT civil rights. Gushee, however, nevertheless describes himself as a "progressive evangelical."

Books