Announcing Dissertation Scholarship Awardee: Samuel Davidson

Samuel Davidson is a Ph.D. candidate in Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Prior to moving to Princeton, he graduated with his B.A. in Religion from Baylor University and his M.Div. from George W. Truett Theological Seminary, before earning an M.Th. by Research (with Distinction) at the University of Edinburgh, where his work focused primarily on developing novel theological methodologies for engaging psychological suffering. He has published articles in Perspectives in Religious Studies, Journal of European Baptist Studies, and Journal of Psychology and Theology, among others. He currently lives in Waco, TX, where he is a lay member of DaySpring Baptist Church and adjunct faculty at Truett Seminary, and is attempting to turn his family’s small city lot into a suburban microfarm and experiment in regenerative land use. He and his wife, Alexis, have two boys under three, who are not at all interested in his academic endeavors.

His doctoral dissertation (“Deep Ecclesiology: An Ecological Recalibration of the Doctrine of the Church”) is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary project that engages ecology, biology, and psychology, and proposes a constructive ecological theology of the church. In conversation with contemporary cosmic Christologies and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology, the project proposes that the nature and boundaries of the church should be seen as extending beyond the human to include the ecological communities of which human beings are a part. Beyond and related to the dissertation, he is also interested in the doctrine of creation, regenerative agriculture, questions of Baptist identity, and setting the phenomenology of psychological suffering in theological perspective.