Gabriella Lettini


Gabriella Lettini is an Italian-American Waldensian pastor and academic. Rev. Dr. Lettini is professor of theological ethics at the Graduate Theological Union and is Dean of the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. She is President of the American Waldensian Society and a member of the North Atlantic section of the European Society of Women in Theological Research.

Academic career

Lettini graduated in 1995 from the Facoltà Valdese di Teologia in Turin with a thesis on the figure of Jesus in the cinema. She earned her Ph.D. in Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary with a dissertation titled The Allergy of the Other, which analyzes the theological conceptions of alterity and the hegemonic schemes of the construction of identity.
In January 2011 Lettini organized in Rome an international interdisciplinary course on ecumenical theology. Bringing together all her institutional affiliations, she made the course a collaborative project of Waldensian Theological Seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, Union Theological Seminary in New York, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and the American Waldensian Society. In a 2017 interview Lettini said she would like it if academic theology could develop more organically as community theology, with real dialogue between the believers and theologians; she thinks the current rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics is a good thing, but, pointing to the history of Christian complicity in the world's worst atrocities, she considers their differing theological tenets less important than "to offer a corrective to these aberrations of the Christian faith."
In 2017 she agreed to provide space at the Starr King School for the Ministry for the new women-led mosque Qalbu Maryam upon request of mosque founder Rabiʻa Keeble, a 2012 alumna of that institution.
Lettini's recent research explores the different models of identity and their implications for theology and ethics; at the same time, she continues her research on movies as sources of theological reflection. In concert with Rita Nakashima Brock, Lettini has developed the practice of soul repair from "a wound of war called 'moral injury'," defined as "the violation of core moral beliefs."

Publications

Lettini published her book Omosessualità in 1999, based on her experience in pastoral work. She has also published various contributions on syncretism, theology and culture, liberation theology, feminist theology, women and theology, cinema and religion, and religious tradition and "the Other" in articles and edited volumes.

Books