Kathryn House

Rev. Kathryn House, Ph.D. joined the Meadville Lombard faculty in 2023. Prior to her appointment, House served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. House continues to direct the Myrtle Collaboration, an Innovation Hub of the Called to Lives of Meaning and Purpose Initiative at Louisville Seminary, now in its final year. House completed her Ph.D. in Theological Studies and MDiv. at Boston University School of Theology. While at the School of Theology, she was also Assistant Director of the Center for Practical Theology and Instructional Coordinator for Distance Learning Initiatives.  

House’s research interests include prophetic religious leadership, evangelical purity culture, liberation theologies, religious trauma, theologies of vocation, practical theology, and Baptist theology. Her current project, an expansion of her dissertation The Afterlife of White Evangelical Purity Culture: Wounds, Legacies, and Impacts, investigates the theological legacies of white evangelical purity culture (WEPC) and proposes a Baptist theology of baptism as a practice of solidarity in response. Her project foregrounds the passionate evangelical millennialism of antebellum female moral reformers’ efforts to curb prostitution between 1834 and 1838; the faith-based activism of women who fought to end, as well as to foment, racial terror lynchings in the United States; and contemporary criticisms and constructive ethics of the most recent purity movement known as evangelical purity culture. It also considers recent resonant debates over dissonant deployments of bodily and religious freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

House has contributed chapters to the edited volumes Trauma and Lived Religion: Transcending the Ordinary (Palgrave Macmillan) and Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay (White Cloud Press). House is also completing a chapter envisioning a Baptist theology of ordination after the #MeToo movement for the forthcoming volume of Baptist Sacramentalism (Wipf and Stock).  

House is a theological educator who nurtures learners’ capacities for critical engagement with diverse traditions and texts so that they might lead with a deep understanding of their contexts and communities and pursue their calls with creativity and courage. Her pedagogy is grounded in transformative learning theory and informed by feminist and antiracist commitments. House is currently a co-instructor, with Dr. Nicole Kirk, of the “Leadership Studies: Administration” course at MLTS, and will develop courses in spirituality and social change, ethical leadership, theories of liberation, and research methods at MLTS. House is an adjunct faculty member for the DMin. program at Louisville Seminary.

An ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches, USA, and the Alliance of Baptists, House is the former Pastor for Christian Formation at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where she is Clerk of the Church Council and a member of the Board of the Centre for Faith, Art, and Justice. House is also the First Vice President of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion Region-at-Large.