Acting Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality
Julia Feder, PhD
137 Madeleva Hall
jfeder@saintmarys.edu
(574) 284-4636
Julia Feder is the Acting Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality and Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theology. She previously served as Associate Professor of Theology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. In recent years, she led an interdisciplinary research team which investigated the ways that the Midwest Jesuits handled the case of Daniel Kenney, a former priest and high school teacher at Creighton Preparatory School who had been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors in his care. Before joining the faculty at Creighton, she worked as a research fellow at Notre Dame’s Center for Theology, Science, and Human Flourishing where she partnered with biological anthropologists to make sense of the centrality of symbol-making in human evolutionary history. She is the author of the book Incarnating Grace: A Theology of Healing from Sexual Trauma, winner of the College Theology Society's 2025 Best Book Award. In this book, she attempts to save our broken ways of talking about God’s grace by discarding that which fosters violence and unearthing some of the liberating resources buried in the Christian tradition—especially, the mystical theology of Teresa of Avila and the political theology of Edward Schillebeeckx. Dr. Feder received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.