David P. Gushee is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University. Raised in Virginia, he earned his Bachelor of Arts at the College of William and Mary (1984), Master of Divinity at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1987) and both the Master of Philosophy (1990) and Doctor of Philosophy (1993) at Union Theological Seminary in New York. And he recently received an honorary Doctor of Divinity (D.D.) from the John Leland Center for Theological Studies. Dr. Gushee came to Mercer in 2007 from Union University, where he served for 11 years.
As Distinguished University Professor, Dr. Gushee teaches at McAfee School of Theology and throughout Mercer University in his specialty, Christian ethics. Beyond his work at Mercer, he is the president of Evangelicals for Human Rights, a weekly columnist for Associated Baptist Press, a periodic contributor to the editorial page of USA Today, and a contributing editor for Christianity Today. Dr. Gushee also currently serves as Co-Chair of the Scriptural/Contextual Ethics Interest Group of the American Academy of Religion, as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, on the Christian Ethics Commission of the Baptist World Alliance, and on the Church Relations Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington
He has published eleven books, over 90 scholarly essays, book chapters, articles, and reviews, and hundreds of magazine articles and opinion pieces. His books include the award-winning Kingdom Ethics (now in its 8th printing, with 20,000 copies in print, and available in six translations) as well as Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust and Only Human. He was the principal drafter of both the Evangelical Climate Initiative (2006) and the Evangelical Declaration against Torture (2007).
Currently, Dr. Gushee’s research interests focus on issues emerging at the intersection between Christian faith, ethics and public policy. He published two books in 2008, The Future of Faith in American Politics (Baylor University Press) and The Scholarly Vocation and the Baptist Academy (Mercer University Press). In 2009, working with co-editors Jillian Hickman Zimmer and Drew Zimmer, Dr. Gushee will publish a collection of essays entitled Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul (Mercer University Press). He also plans to complete work on a long-term academic project with Eerdmans Press on the sanctity of human life.
