BCLA Announces the next T. Marie Chilton Chair of Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University: Prof. Nancy Pineda-Madrid

From the news service at Loyola Marymount Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts:

Since its founding in 1999, the T. Marie Chilton Chair was held by Thomas Rausch, S.J., who retired from the full-time Loyola Marymount University faculty in 2017. After a year as the visiting Chilton Chair, Nancy Pineda-Madrid, associate professor of theological studies, now joins the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts faculty permanently as the T. Marie Chilton Chair of Catholic Theology at LMU.

Prof. Pineda-Madrid comes to LMU from Boston College, where she was associate professor of theology and Latinx/a ministry and taught for the past 14 years.  Prof. Pineda-Madrid is returning to LMU after many years; she received her B.B.A. from LMU, from which her academic career was launched. Nancy then earned a Master of Divinity from Seattle University and a Ph.D. in Systematic and Philosophical Theology from the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, California). With expertise in soteriology and North Amercian Pragmatism and Religious Thought, Prof. Pineda-Madrid is a leading voice in U.S. LatinX theologies, as well as U.S. and global feminist theologies.

In her new role, Prof. Pineda-Madrid seeks to advance a Catholic theological response to the sharply escalating violence against women in the Americas and around the world. “Our time demands a Catholic theology that unequivocally supports the full humanity of women and denounces all forms of misogyny,” says Prof. Pineda-Madrid. “Theology that fails to call this violence and misogyny into question and falls far short of the best of Catholic theology.” As the T. Marie Chilton Chair of Catholic Theology at LMU, Prof. Pineda-Madrid will teach classes, create public programming, and build community to advance the conversation about violence against women (and others) as one critical contemporary iteration of central theological problems such as evil and salvation. This work involves reflecting intentionally on the theological issues presented by the construct and context of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, of which Los Angeles and Southern California are an important dimension.