Christina Hutchins

Lecturer in Theology and Literary Arts

Academic Credentials: 
BS, University of California at Davis, 1983; MDiv Harvard University Divinity School, 1991; PhD, Graduate Theological Union, 2008
Quote: 
“The ways we learn, feel, and labor to value the relational motions of the sacred in our world matter immensely. How will we embody and re-create the languages, traditions, and ideas we inherit, such that we widen possibilities of new creation for a future that does not belong to us? This question sustains me as poet and scholar, and it guides how I teach the religious leaders, writers, and environmental and social activists of the next crucial decades.”
Profile: 

Dr. Hutchins teaches process theology/philosophy and courses on poetry and theological imagination. She worked as a biochemist before attending Harvard, where she twice won the Billings Preaching Prize. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, she ministered to a northern California congregation, and her interdisciplinary dissertation drew on Alfred North Whitehead and Judith Butler to read the agency and value of events through the radiance of time. Scholarly essays on the intersections of poetry, process, and queer theory appear in volumes by Ashgate, SUNY, and Columbia UP, and her poetry books are The Stranger Dissolves (2011), Radiantly We Inhabit the Air (Becker Chapbook Prize, 2010), and Collecting Light (1999), She has won The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, The National Poetry Review’s Finch Prize, two Barbara Deming Awards, and the James Phelan Poetry Prize, and her poems appear in periodicals such as The New Republic, Antioch Review, Salmagundi, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Women’s Review of Books. She also works for the Disciples Seminary Foundation in Berkeley and serves as the first Poet Laureate of Albany, CA.