Directory

Joseph Flipper

Associate Professor; Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology

Full-Time Faculty

College of Arts and Sciences: Religious Studies

Profile

Dr. Flipper serves as Mary Ann Spearin Chair of Catholic Theology at the University of Dayton with appointments in the Department of Religious Studies and the Race and Ethnic Studies Program. Formerly, he was Associate Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky., where he also served as the Associate Director of the Ethics and Social Justice Center. He was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship in 2019-20 and he was in residence as a Visiting Scholar at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. He was the recipient of a 2011 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a doctoral fellowship from the Forum for Theological Exploration.

Dr. Flipper’s research intersects three areas: Black Catholicism in the United States, race and religion, and twentieth-century Catholic theology. He published Between Apocalypse ad Eschaton: History and Eternity in Henri de Lubac (2015), which examines the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac’s theological account of history in the context of the broad revival of eschatological thinking in the twentieth century. He has written articles on de Lubac, Black theology, political theology and race and religion in U.S. Catholicism. His second book, Theological Terrain: Geography and Ecclesiology in Twentieth-Century Catholicism, will examine geography in Catholic ecclesiology across transnational contexts.

He is the co-chair for the 2021 Conference of Ford Fellows. He serves on Committee for Underrepresented Ethnic and Racial Groups at the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA). He is a member of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, the Catholic Theological Society of America and the College Theology Society. He is the Moderator of the Black Catholic Theology Consultation at the CTSA. In 2020-21 he was a member of the Wabash Center Virtual Salon for Mid-Career Faculty of African Descent, through which he worked on areas of pedagogy and antiracism.