“Your footnotes are walking around,” Stephen Presley told a group of Southern Seminary PhD students who had traveled to Oxford University. Presley, Church History Professor at Southern Seminary, traveled to the U.K. along with a group of PhD students to attend the Nineteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies.
The conference featured leading and budding scholars who presented papers and workshops on subjects dealing with the earliest centuries of Christian history—subjects directly related to the concentration of Southern’s participants.
For Hannah Turrill, a PhD studying the Early Church, interacting with the leading authors in her field at the conference made her own work come to life.
“The conference was very fruitful in terms of building relationships and growing in my knowledge of the content,” Turrill said. “The conference began with a garden party where, as Dr. Presley said, ‘our footnotes were walking around.’ I got to reconnect with people I had met at other conferences, and I met some of the professors whose work I’d been using for my own doctoral work.”
Turrill said attending the conference helped confirm her decision to work on a PhD at Southern Seminary.
“Thanks to the guidance of the professors at Southern, I came to the conference well-prepared to interact with scholars from both secular and confessional institutions,” Turrill said. “I still have much to learn, but this conference showed me that my education at Southern had prepared me to engage wisely and well with scholarship and understand the dynamics in my field. Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Presley’s practical advice, encouragement, and modeling helped me to feel confident in engaging with scholars from various perspectives with grace and virtue.”
Logan Pettyman, PhD student at Southern Seminary who also attended the conference, plans to teach in Christian higher education. Pettyman said the opportunity to participate in the academic conference exemplifies how the Southern Seminary PhD equips him to fulfill his calling.
“I would like to teach in a Christian higher education context,” Pettyman said. “Southern has provided me with the best of both worlds—the scholarly and confessional.”
As Turrill and Pettyman realize, Southern Seminary prioritizes academic rigor for the church. Presley helps spearhead getting students to engage in the academy because he knows the value confessional students can bring to their contemporary fields of study.
Another conference attendee, Tom Holsteen, views his PhD supervisor as a great model for Christian scholarship.
“Dr. Presley, has been an enormous help in navigating careful engagement with current scholarship as a Christian,” Holsteen said. “Dr. Presley requires his students to do meticulous work in the primary sources, but also to understand the main currents in contemporary secular scholarship on early Christianity. Ideas in the academy always find their way into the pews. Too often, those ideas are proliferated by writers who do not share the worldview of their Christian subject. Confessional scholars have an advantage in academic conversations because we share the moral and metaphysical commitments of the Early Church. They were Christians and need to be understood as Christians.”
Academica, however, can be challenging for people of faith. When Christian scholars feel isolated, it can be easy to drift along with the waves of secularism and liberalism that have infiltrated Christian studies. That’s why Turrill believes Southern Seminary is the best place to study with like-minded professors and colleagues who not only care about their disciplines but see the true purpose of scholarship as a formation of Christian character.
“I decided to do a PhD at Southern because I wanted the mentorship and guidance of professors I knew would drive me deeper in my faith as I studied,” Turrill said. “I knew there were other places I could get training in the literature, but my mentors at Southern would also seek to form me as a person and spur me on to virtue and to greater love of Christ through my engagement with scholarship. That has proven truer than I could have hoped, and I’m so thankful to have the privilege of studying here.”
Traveling with fellow students and finding their own place in the academy also has advantages.
“It was a tremendous gift to attend the conference alongside my classmates at Southern,” Turrill said. “We built relationships more broadly through our different networks of friends from other conferences, and we had time to debrief about the papers we heard and our interactions with other scholars.”
All participants expressed gratitude for a place like Southern Seminary where they can grow as committed Christians and the highest caliber of scholars. At Southern Seminary, you get to study with the authors. But those authors help connect you with other authors around the globe so you can find your seat at the table in the academy. The urgency of fostering the academic life and the spiritual health of the church ultimately produces confessional scholarship that finds its way into confessional pews.
Explore the Southern Seminary degree options today for more information on the PhD program.