Kerry Danner-McDonald

Adjunct Professor, Department of Theology
Hometown: Washington area
Education: B.A. Georgetown, M.A. Washington Theological Union, Ph. D. Graduate Theological Union
Areas of Research: Theology and ethics
Courses Taught: “Problem of God”

You teach a “Problem of God” class that’s very highly rated year after year. What keeps that fresh for you year in and year out?
It’s great. I told my friends, it’s kind of like a joke: “A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a classroom.” So part of what keeps it interesting is the diversity of the students and what they are bringing into it themselves. Because everyone has to take it, the range is just huge. Some people have lots of interest, sometimes people have no interest and sometimes the interest grows through the course. And that’s really what makes it interesting. 

In your courses, you especially emphasize atheism, and that’s interesting because even at a Catholic and Jesuit school a lot of people identify as atheists. How do students like that impact class discussion?
Students come into it from all over the map but I’ve tried to make my class friendly to believers, questioners and atheists. I think it’s really important and I tell my students, although people tell you not to talk about religion and politics if you want a functioning democracy, you kind of have to learn to talk about religion and politics, and so that’s what we practice in the course, and I think it can be really interesting and challenging for people who have predominantly atheist views to hear believers speak right next to them and the same thing for a believer. That really gives the class richness. 

I’d be interested in hearing a bit more about what research you do at Georgetown and how what you teach informs your research and vice versa.
I’m actually trained in theological ethics so my research doesn’t always align with “The Problem of God.” Some of my research has been around cognitive linguistics and the way the brain reacts to scripture. A book project that I’m working on now that has been partially inspired by the teaching here at Georgetown is about the range of motivation that people bring to social justice work, so right now I’m interviewing 20 to 30 people who have lifelong justice commitments and it includes people of no-faith backgrounds, deep-faith backgrounds and questioning backgrounds and an exploration of what values they hold, what life moments help them shape these commitments and how they’ve leveraged their skills, gifts, financial resources and social connections, all those things that come into fostering that depth of their commitment. So part of it is about narrative analysis and the other part of it is looking at the empirical sciences. I was at a fellowship down at Wake Forest last summer for a couple of weeks and there has been a lot of work coming out of psychology that’s been challenging to some of the core components of virtue ethics and I’m interested in combining those things. 

Can you talk about your path to Georgetown and theology?
I went to Georgetown and I graduated from the theology department. I loved it, and struggled with, my experience here because I wanted more of the practical application and I was able to seek that out and find it, but it took a little work. Then I worked in a variety of not for profits, I taught in Southeast [D.C.] for a while. But I couldn’t shake the Ph.D. bug and I ended up going out to Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, in part because my main advisor at Georgetown was president of the university there at the time and inspired me to go. It’s a very ecumenical environment, again people from many faith backgrounds. And so I kept that connection and part of the reason I’m at Georgetown now, as part of my situation specifically and the various ways people get into academics — I work adjunct here. My entire family is in the D.C. area. When I finished my dissertation, I also had my children along the way and I had to make some decisions about whether I was willing to move us to wherever the job is and ultimately I decided that I wasn’t quite ready to do that, so I explored working part-time. I used to teach over at Marymount as well, but for the past few years I’ve just been here at Georgetown.

What do you wish students would do differently here?
I wish they got more out of their comfort zone. D.C. is a huge, varied place and, as you may have heard, I always try to get my students to go to the National Museum of the American Indian for a field trip. Just leaving Georgetown is important and if you can even cross the river, cross the river. I know a lot of people come here because it is the center of power, but it’s a complicated place and I wish students would engage more with D.C. and all the questions it really should be raising for critical thinkers and sometimes it doesn’t. So again, I love Georgetown, I love the education, I’m happy for the education that I got here and I’m delighted to be teaching the next generation of Georgetown students. But the reality is that we are all privileged to be here and how to get students and administrators to think critically about that position of privilege and how to best use it to serve the world and others remains the hardest part and the biggest question for us and any institution with the resources and prestige that we have.

Interview by Evan Hollander