The Rev. Dr. James Hudnut-Beumler

James Hudnut-Beumler is the Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University. He served as Dean of Vanderbilt’s Divinity School from 2000 until 2013. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2000, he was dean of the faculty at Columbia Theological Seminary, a program associate for Lilly Endowment, and director of the undergraduate program in Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945-1965 (Rutgers, 1994) and Generous Saints: Congregations Rethinking Money and Ethics (Alban, 1999), and is co-author of The History of the Riverside Church in the City of New York (NYU, 2005). He completed an economic history of American Protestantism from 1750 to the present, entitled, In Pursuit of the Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (University of North Carolina, 2007). Most recently he co-edited The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South (University of North Carolina, 2018). Jim and his wife, Heidi, are both Presbyterian ministers and they have two children—Julia, a pediatric resident physician in Denver, and Adam who is working on his Ph.D. in American Religion at Duke University.