Theology Professor Molded at HDS

Erik Owens, MTS '96, Director, International Studies Program; Professor of the Practice in Theology, Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA)

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Describe the work you do today:

I am a theology professor at Boston College, teaching courses on ethics and religion in international politics; religion in American public life; global citizenship; and political theologies of citizenship. I am also an academic administrator, serving as director of the International Studies Program, a large interdisciplinary undergraduate major/minor in the college of arts & sciences. I have a courtesy appointment our school of education, and I direct the Program on Global Ethics and Social Trust, an international project based that brings faculty together across disciplinary and institutional boundaries to address the ethical dimensions of urgent global issues and the implications for our academic, political, and religious communities. 

The balance of my work shifts weekly among teaching, student advising, work with faculty (hiring, mentoring, curriculum development, etc.), academic programming (hosting events in our program, and more broadly across the university, on projects related to international affairs, global engagement, student formation, and democratic education), alumni relations, research, and university service. It's roughly balanced between working with undergraduates and working with faculty/administrators. 

How has your HDS degree influenced your career journey?

One important way HDS influenced my career journey is by helping me connect with fellow travelers at an early point in my career. Having built meaningful relationships while I was at HDS (mid-1990s), those conversations and shared interests moved into other venues as we reconnected in later years at universities or at conferences.
 
My HDS MTS program also set me on the intellectual and professional path to my PhD program. While I decided to pursue that PhD elsewhere (UChicago), the energy and depth of my HDS education showed me what rigorous scholarly work looked like, opened entirely new areas of study and reflection, and modeled a way of being a professor that really resonated with me. Thirty years later, I still remember and think about many of the conversations we had in classes, and I still hope I can be for others the kind of mentor and teacher my HDS faculty were for me.

What career advice would you offer to current HDS students?

Consider what is most meaningful about the work you want to do and be open-minded about where and how you can do it. 

Higher education as a whole is facing some grave challenges in our country these days (including funding dramatic cuts from the federal government, distrust of our work and value among broad parts of the population, and demographic declines in the college-age population), in addition to the already grave challenges that graduate theological education has faced for the past twenty years. The older generation's vision of a tenure-track job at a research university is only available to a tiny sliver of people. 

But there remains a huge need for the work you are training to do, and there are still places where you can do that work in meaningful, rewarding settings including universities but also secondary schools, religious communities, community organizations, hospitals, relief organizations, news organizations, businesses, governments (especially state and local governments at this point), and more. I think it's important to enter HDS with an open mind about career pathways and opportunities, because you'll be exposed to so many interesting and inspiring people who can model the ways they seek to make a difference.