Arthur G. Holder
Professor of Christian Spirituality
Arthur Holder is a historian of Christian spirituality with particular interests in early medieval biblical interpretation, mysticism, and the writings of the Venerable Bede. A priest of the Episcopal Church, he was Professor and Academic Dean at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific before serving as Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs for the Graduate Theological Union (2002-2016). In the American Academy of Religion he has been co-chair of the Christian Spirituality Group (2003-2008) and a member of the Theological Education Committee (2013-2016). He is an active member in the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, for which he served as President in 2009. At the GTU he gave the Distinguished Faculty Lecture on “Will Spirituality Have a Past?” in 2010 and the Annual Reading of the Sacred Texts on “Religious Experience as Sacred Text” in 2013. He received the GTU Excellence in Teaching Award in 2019.
PhD, Duke University, 1987
MDiv, The General Theological Seminary, 1976
AB, Duke University, 1973
- History of Christian Spirituality
- Christian Spirituality as an Academic Discipline
- Anglo-Saxon Spirituality
- Celtic Spirituality
- Benedictine Spirituality
- Medieval Christian Exegesis of the Song of Songs
- Bede: “On the Song of Songs” and Selected Writings, Paulist Press, 2011.
- Christian Spirituality: The Classics, ed., Routledge, 2010.
- Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
- Bede: A Biblical Miscellany, (with W. Trent Foley), Liverpool University Press, 1998.
- Bede: On the Tabernacle, Liverpool University Press, 1994.
- “The Problem with ‘Spiritual Classics’,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, 2010.
- History and Culture Seminar
- Doctoral Seminar in Christian Spirituality
- History of Christian Spirituality
- Medieval English Mystics
- Song of Songs in Christian Mysticism