CDSP names Aminah Al-Attas Bradford to faculty position in theology & ethics
Church Divinity School of the Pacific (CDSP) has called Dr. Aminah Al-Attas Bradford to serve as assistant professor of systematic theology and ethics beginning May 1.
“Our new curriculum seeks to break down disciplinary silos and allow students to experience the well-established benefits of collaborative teaching,” said Dr. Stephen Fowl, president and dean. “Dr. Al-Attas Bradford personifies so much of that approach in her scholarship and leadership experience, which will make her a terrific faculty colleague.”
Al-Attas Bradford holds a ThD in systematic theology from Duke Divinity School and an MDiv from Regent College in Vancouver. Sometimes referred to as “a theologian in a labcoat,” she is a research scholar in the Public Science Lab for Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity of Humans and Food at North Carolina State University. At NC State, and now at CDSP, Al-Attas Bradford hosts the Symbiotic Theology Project, exploring the interface between science, theology, and the microbial world.
“My lab-based context informs how I think about students’ theological and moral formation. I’m looking forward to engaging church teachings with CDSP students as we explore what difference doctrine makes in the complex worlds where students serve and lead,” Al-Attas Bradford said. “Theology is never for its own sake. Working as an ethics and theological consultant in secular scientific space requires the same cultural sensitivities, vulnerability, listening practices, and translational skills that priests need to manifest the story of God within and beyond the walls of the church.”
Part of what drew Al-Attas Bradford to CDSP is the school’s contextually grounded approach to theological education, with students engaging most of their studies in their home dioceses.
“Stability has historically been a value in Christian spiritual formation,” she said. “Rootedness affords greater openness, which is a gift given how transformational and demanding seminary can be.”
Beyond her academic theological vocation, Al-Attas Bradford has more than fifteen years of ministry experience in university settings and non-profit work. She has served as a university chaplain at Calvin University and Salem Women’s College, and as the director of service-learning at Houston Christian University. Beyond her own ministry experience, at Calvin she supervised more than forty seminarians in year-long campus ministry internships.
Al-Attas Bradford is also a fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, where she serves as a spiritual and ethical consultant on projects that seek to defend the rights of nature and to consider humanity’s planetary future.
“Whether I’m at a biodiversity conservation conference in Copenhagen, hosting a moral theology class with CDSP seminarians, or even just turning the compost pile in our garden in Durham, all of this work emerges from taking sacramentality seriously, from believing that all matter matters, and from the conviction that God uses other-than-human creatures, even microbial ones, to make human creatures more like God.”
Al-Attas Bradford is currently writing what she calls a “symbiocentric” systematic theology.
“My natural science colleagues’ attunement to the material world invites Christians to consider this mutual interdependence theologically,” she said. “Our interconnectedness is not only a biological fact. It is a spiritual one.”
Although formerly ordained in the Christian Reformed Church, Al-Attas Bradford has a lifelong history with the Episcopal faith. Growing up in a bi-religious, Yemeni-American household, her years as a student at St. Francis Episcopal Day School formed her affections for the tradition.
“I couldn’t have explained it back then, but praying the liturgy twice a week in chapel became one of the strongest experiences of belonging I knew in childhood.” she said. “That sense of belonging never left.”
Al-Attas Bradford has worshiped regularly in Episcopal congregations in Honduras and Houston and is currently a member of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Chapel Hill, where she’s in the discernment process for ordination in the Episcopal Church.
She lives on what she calls a “fauxstead” hobby farm in Durham, NC, with her husband, two daughters, and two cats. Together they enjoy making whatever they can out of wood, clay, textiles, and plants.
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Church Divinity School of the Pacific is an Episcopal seminary shaped by the West Coast context, forming leaders called to find new ways to create Christian communities and share God’s love.
Through our partnership with Trinity Church and an ongoing dialog with bishops and grassroots leaders, we have focused our degree programs on preparing community-oriented, spiritually adept, and resilient priests who will help create the Episcopal Church of the future.
All of our degree students participate in a hybrid program, with travel expenses for four yearly gathered sessions in partner dioceses subsidized by the seminary. MDiv students receive full-tuition scholarships as well as a fully funded, two-year curacy in their diocese after graduation.