Rev. Dr. Aaron Stauffer
Assistant Professor of Social Ethics and Community Leadership & Director of Academic Assessment and Institutional Effectiveness
Phone: 913-253-5013
Email:
Curriculum Vitae
Education
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York 2020
Ph.D., Social Ethics
Dissertation: Organizing Lived Religious Practices for Power: Sacred Value in Broad-Based Community
Organizing.
Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York 2014
M.Div. in Interreligious and Ecumenical Studies
Thesis (with Distinction): “Re-Enchantment and Dissent: Religion and Race in the Essays of Ralph
Waldo Emerson and James Baldwin.” Readers: Dr. Gary Dorrien, Dr. James Cone.
If you wereleading students in a research project based on your disciplinary interests, what would be the title/s?
Social ethics is about a movement of the faithful — a way of living and enacting our faith. So much of my work centers on Christians and churches coming together to enact their faith as they work for social justice — this work is at the very heart of the future of the congregation and of Christian faith formation. I'm not sure about complete titles, but I hope the following words would appear:community organizing, social gospel, lived religion, and social ethics.
What do you hope your students come away with when they leave your classroom?
I hope to inspire a passion for deep thinking and critical faithfulness. Congregations need leaders who earn the trust of their congregants and who are curious about building relational power to enact their mission and vocation as a church.
What is your teaching style?
I love conversation as a teaching tool. For me, theological education is about the collective process of forming and reforming ourselves as faithful Christians committed, to draw from Saint Paul's Wesleyan tradition, to social holiness. I hope to craft classrooms that accomplish this through deep and critical conversation about a subject and what we each bring to it and therefore to each other.
Recent Publications
Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Values, and Broad-based Community Organizing. AAR
Academy Series (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2024)
Reviews:
- Review by James McCarty for Journal of Society of Christian Ethics,
- Symposium with Molly Farneth, Richard Wood, Emily Dumler-Winckler, David Chao, and Dan Rhodes in
Syndicate
listening-to-the-spirit/
Peer Reviewed Articles:
2025: “Under-Connected: Building Relational Power, Solidarity, and Developing Leaders in Broad-Based Community Organizing" Religions 16, no. 5: 620.
2024: “Power in the Social Gospel: Howard Kester, Claude Williams and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union" Religions 15, no. 9: 1091 (2024).
