BIOGRAPHY

Religion is fascinating. It’s what humans from time out of mind have thought about their condition, words they’ve spoken and sung to articulate their sense that they were not alone, and deeds they have done to make the world around and within them different. For those reasons and more, a boring religion class is inexcusable. If he becomes animated as he lectures or hops on a desk to prove a point, as he (famously) does in Religion 100 or impersonates the everyday experience of a second-century Greek Christian, he does so in the hopes that his love of the subject will be contagious and transformative. If you are in his class, he hopes that you will learn to love the questions religion raises and take those questions with you from the classroom into your life. 

Dr. William McDonald’s research enhances his teaching. The more detail he knows, the more the fascination grows. For instance, the first research project he worked on when he began teaching at Tennessee Wesleyan was about the life and times of Pastor Robert Johnston Miller, an early nineteenth-century Lutheran minister who traipsed across the mountains of North Carolina, Southwest Virginia, and East Tennessee, visiting far-flung communities and establishing congregations. Pastor Miller left us his diary, giving us a glimpse not only of the Appalachia of 200 years ago, but of religious life in this region. Students in my course on Religion in Appalachia can see much deeper and wider by exploring the region through this long-ago missionary pastor’s eyes.

As the research on Pastor Miller suggests, my field is Church History, or, specifically, Historical Theology, what Christians have believed through the centuries. One way in which Christians have passed on their faith to younger generations is through the genre of the catechism, a document often in question-and-answer form expressive of what mattered most to a particular tradition, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. Dr. William McDonald edited a three-volume anthology of catechisms, Christian Catechetical Texts, as an easy, one-stop field guide so readers can easily compare and contrast these statements of faith.

He is also deeply involved in efforts to heal divisions across Christianity, called “ecumenism” or the ecumenical movement. While this movement had early representatives like Pastor Miller, it took the shape of later movements like the YMCA, the World Council of Churches, and even local congregations of different Christians who band together, not to blur or forget the value of their respective ways of thinking and doing, but to share them. Many of these ecumenical congregations have arisen across the U.S. and Canada, particularly in rural areas. I joined with two colleagues from different universities in writing Daring to Share: Multi-Denominational Congregations in the United States and Canada. Researching that book took us to numerous congregations for interviews and a first-hand look at how such “joint” congregations balanced their unity and diversity. 

Presently, he is finishing a book, titled Luther and Wesley in the Vineyard of Souls, a look at two towering figures from the Christian past: Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, and John Wesley, founder of Methodism and namesake of Tennessee Wesleyan University. What if the two could sit down and talk to one another? How can the two, and their contemporary followers, learn from one another? The answers just might help us better put their positions into a wider perspective and help us to learn from both as though they were “team teaching” a course. 

Martin Luther and John Wesley, team-teaching a course. Now that would be fascinating!