Honorary Degrees
1918 - Present
 



Elisabeth  Schussler Fiorenza 
Doctor of Divinity  2004
Status: conferred

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, writer, educator, and scholar, is best known for her groundbreaking book, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (1983), a work that challenged all previous assumptions about the character of earliest Christian history, laid the foundations for feminist biblical scholarship, and has become an internationally recognized classic text in feminist theology, translated into twelve languages. Her work in biblical scholarship always pushes us beyond the standard boundaries of biblical interpretation to show its interconnections with politics, rhetoric, epistemology, and education. She is the co-founder and editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and was the first women to be elected resident of the Society of Biblical Literature. For her refusal ever to settle for the easy answer, for her unwavering insistence on the interrelationship of oppressions, for her unrelenting challenge to the churches to take women seriously, for her willingness to take the kind of academic risks that continue to open new ways of understanding the complex religious, social and political worlds in which we live, SMU is honored to confer upon Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa.