Swift Hall 221
1025 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

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W. Clark Gilpin

Margaret E. Burton Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Christianity and Theology in the Divinity School; also in the College

M.Div. (Lexington Theological Seminary)
M.A., Ph.D. (University of Chicago)

Clark Gilpin is a historian of Christianity who studies the cultural history of theology in England and America since the seventeenth century. He has published an intellectual biography of Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century advocate of religious liberty. A more recent book, A Preface to Theology, examines the history of American theological scholarship in terms of the theologian’s responsibilities to a three-fold public in the churches, the academic community, and civil society. He is currently completing a monograph, The Letter from Prison: Testimony and Literary Form in Early Modern England, which analyzes the letter from prison as a genre of religious literature in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another book-length project has the working title Alone with the Alone: Solitude in American Religious and Literary History. It explores ways in which the religious discipline of solitary writing—autobiographic narratives, journals, and letters—shaped the careers of major New England intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"The Letter from Prison in Christian History and Theology," Religion and Culture Web Forum, January 2003.