Joel James Shuman, Ph.D., is Professor of Theology at King’s College where he has taught since 2001. A native of West Virginia, he was raised on a subsistence farm homesteaded in the 1850s by his maternal great-great-grandparents. He attended Bethany (WV) College, graduated from the Program in Physical Therapy at the Medical College of Virginia, and, after ten years practicing physical therapy, earned the Master of Theological Studies (summa cum laude) from Duke University Divinity School, and the Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Although his academic interests are eclectic, much of Dr. Shuman's work happens at the intersection of moral theology with medicine and other applied sciences. He is the author of dozens of popular and scholarly articles and book chapters, and has authored or co-authored four books and co-edited a fifth. He spent the 2018-19 academic year as the Scholar-in-Residence in the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School, where he taught and did research on the opioid crisis.
Dr. Shuman has been married since 1981 to Christine Shuman, née Faber. They are the parents of three adult children and have three grandsons, all of whom live in North Carolina. In his spare time, he enjoys carpentry, reading, and listening to good music.
Education
B.S. (P.T.), Physical Therapy, Medical College of Virginia
M.T.S., Theological Studies, Duke University Divinity School
Ph.D., Theological Ethics, Duke University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Publications
“Reclaiming Broken Bodies (or, This is gonna hurt some): Pain, Healing, and the Opioid Crisis,” Christian Bioethics, November 2023.
“Protestant Perspectives on Reproduction and Parenting” in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Perspectives on Reproductive Ethics, 2023.
“The Other Epidemic During the Pandemic: Diseases and Deaths of Despair,” presented at Health, Hope, and Despair September 2022.
“The Story is the Point: Alasdair MacIntyre, Reading Literature, and Teaching Ethics,” Expositions: Interdisciplinary Explorations in the Humanities, 2020.
Book Review of After God: Morality and Bioethics in a Secular Age, by H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Modern Theology, April 2019
Awards and Designations
Herve A. LeBlanc Distinguished Service Professor 2022
The Honorable Max and Tillie Rosen Award for Faculty Excellence (2018)
