Dr. Dennis Edwards: On Speaking from the Margins

Foreword

Rev. Dr. Dennis Edwards joins Dr. Madison Pierce and Dr. James Arcadi for episode nine. Dennis is Associate Professor of New Testament at North Park University, along with being an ordained minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church. He has attended Cornell University, completed an MDiv at TEDS, and finished his education with a PhD at the Catholic University of America.

Dennis is a multi-talented person, and Madison and James have a great time learning about his journey to faith. He recounts his early experiences in the church and how he eventually discovered a call to ministry and to academic teaching (after earning a chemical engineering degree!). Dennis explains further how he found his way to studying James 5 at Catholic University for his PhD, even while he continued pastoring. He describes how he balances these two dimensions of his life, the academic and the pastoral, and offers crucial insight for the role of study in the life of the church. From there, they discuss his most recent book, Might from the Margins, and how his own experiences of marginalization provide points of contact with other forms of marginalization, and how the church can be reframed to remedy this. He addresses how often evangelicals have operated with recourse to societal power instead of the way of Jesus, which is best exemplified by those on the outside. Dennis finally shares some vital insights from his work in 1 Peter, especially what it teaches us about what it means to live as Christians not understood (or even hurt by) the broader world.

Along the way, listeners will discover…

• Which theology book kept following Dennis around, despite his best attempts to avoid it
• What instrument Dennis plays, even when he preaches
• What Dennis’ hopes for TEDS are

To learn more about Rev. Dr. Dennis Edwards, see his faculty page, purchase Might from the Margins or his commentary on 1 Peter, or watch his recent message at Mosaic.