Ryan T. Ramsey

Dr. Ryan T. Ramsey is visiting assistant professor of history and World Christianity. He has come to PTS as a Louisville Institute postdoctoral fellow, a program for early career scholars whose research projects and senses of vocation attend to current challenges and opportunities in theological education. Ramsey has previously taught at Baylor University and the Seminary of the Southwest. He earned his Ph.D. from Baylor University, studying World Christianity under Dr. Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi. His dissertation focused on the life and religion of Teresa Urrea, a Mexican folk saint, religious healer, and U.S. immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century. Dr. Ramsey’s research juxtaposes World Christianity with decoloniality, focusing especially on how religious leaders develop their theologies, self-understandings, and Christian practices out of a range of contexts and experiences. He focuses especially on Pentecostals, charismatics, and other Christian healers and miracle workers who do not neatly fit those terms.

Dr. Ramsey is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Pentecostal Studies, and he takes part in other conferences and organizations in World Christianity and Ecumenical Studies. He is currently preparing a monograph on Teresa Urrea as well as an edited volume (with Anna Redhair Wells) called The Five Distinctives of World Christianity (forthcoming with Baylor University Press). He has been active and served in lay leadership roles in churches across a denominational spectrum that includes PC(USA), Episcopal, Vineyard, Baptist, Church of God (Cleveland, TN), and United Methodist churches.

Books

The Five Distinctives of World Christianity: Essays in Honor of Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, editor with Anna Redhair Wells, under contract with Baylor University Press.

Peer-Reviewed Essays

“Ambiguous Borders: Curanderismo and World Christianity.” The Journal of Ecumenical Studies 59, no. 3 (2024).

“Decolonial Options for World Christianity: Thinking and Acting with Santa Teresa Urrea and Prophet Garrick Sokari Braide,” in Decolonial Horizons: Reimagining Theology, Ecumenism and Sacramental Praxis, eds. Raimundo C. Barreto and Vladimir Latinovic, Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, 121-40 (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan: 2023).

“Disappointment in Early Pentecostalism: Toward a Historical Methodology.” Religions 13, no. 4 (April 2022): 321.

“Christ in Yaqui Garb: Teresa Urrea’s Christian Theology and Ethics.” Religions 12, no. 2 (Feb 2021): 126.

Popular

“Studying Women in World Christianity: Saints, Spirits, and Gendered Boundaries,” The Occasional, Overseas Ministries Study Center at Princeton Theological Seminary, November 26, 2024.

“Grade Inflation: An Ahistorical Narrative,” with Christopher J. Richmann, Inside Higher Ed, November 14, 2024.