Michael Hogue

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Michael S. Hogue is married to Sara and is the father of Kincade (10), Mikaela (18 months), and a second daughter due in October 2010. He and his family live in Chicago, where he serves as Associate Professor of Theology at Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist) and where Sara practices community social work. He and his family are active members in an Episcopal church and are avid White Sox fans. He came to Chicago to attend the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees, and managed the Divinity School Coffee Shop (known under his tenure as “Grounds of Bean” [sic]).

Though he spent the first half of his life in the lakes and woods of northern Michigan, he has come to love urban life in the twelve years that he has lived in Chicago (in Hyde Park and Woodlawn, just around the corner from the Obama’s, Powell’s, and the Medici). Though he is very much a former athlete, he still enjoys fitness. The most important work in his life is being a father and husband, though theological education, scholarship, and religious activism are also very important to him. He can be found in the early mornings dabbling in meditation and working at prayer before he heads out with Mikaela in the baby-jogger for a run. He teaches and writes about public theology and theological pragmatism, environmental theology and ethics, globalization and theological ethics, and religious change and the discourses of secularity and post-secularity.

As an activist, he serves as faculty coordinator of Oikos: the Religion and Environment Initiative, works as a community organizing partner with the Chicago Clean Power Coalition, and is a member of Southsiders Organizing for Unity and Liberation (SOUL). As a theological educator, he is part of a team of colleagues and students experimenting pedagogically with the cultural and political and social border crossings necessary to integrating effective social change with progressive religious transformation. Towards this, Meadville Lombard will partner with Andover Newton Theological School (Boston, MA) as a founding member of a new interfaith theological university. This new university will “go live” in fall 2011.

In 2008 he was awarded a Templeton Prize for Theological Promise for his first book, The Tangled Bank: Towards an Ecotheological Ethics of Responsible Participation. His second book, The Promise of Religious Naturalism will be published in late September 2010. His next book will focus on the praxis of pragmatic public theology. He has lectured in Germany and Scotland as well as around the U.S. and has published articles in journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, and Crosscurrents. He is active in the American Academy of Religion and the Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought. His academic profile is here.