With the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester, Seminary of the Southwest’s Dean and President, Dr. Scott Bader-Saye, recently announced the appointment of a Dean of Chapel at the seminary. The Rev. Benjamin King, Ph.D., the Duncalf-Villavoso Professor of Church History, will serve in this role.
“Ben brings to this position years of ordained ministry, seminary teaching, and administrative leadership,” said Dr. Bader-Saye. “He will lead our chapel with wisdom, faithfulness, and openness. Ben balances creativity and tradition in ways that fit our hopes for chapel life. He will work closely with the Director of Community Worship, the Rev. Nathan Jennings, to continue to provide rich worship experiences for our community.”
“It is a real honor to be invited by the new Dean and President to be the Dean of Chapel,” said the Rev. King. “It is also a real honor to be working with my colleague Professor Jennings, and a great team of sacristans, to ensure that Christ Chapel remains the still center of our campus life for students in the theology and counseling programs alike, and the place where future ordained and lay leaders are formed for ministry through prayer and worship.”
In addition to serving in this permanent role, the Rev. King is also serving as the interim Academic Dean while the seminary continues its search to fill that position vacated by Dr. Bader-Saye upon his election as the Ninth Dean and President of Southwest by the Board of Trustees this past May.
The Rev. King joined the Southwest faculty in 2023, and has been an Episcopal priest since 2000. His current areas of research are the Oxford Movement, particularly the theology of John Henry Newman; the development of the Anglican Communion; and the Episcopal Church’s historic entanglement with slavery. He teaches the core courses in Church History as well as electives in Anglican theology and history.
In mid September, King will spend a week in Oxford as part of bicentennial celebrations of the first sermon preached by John Henry Newman. Now a saint of the Catholic Church, Newman began his ministry as an Anglican priest in Oxford. Newman was instrumental in the Oxford Movement that reconnected the Anglican Communion to its pre-Reformation roots and had a great deal of influence on Episcopal churches. King will preach at the University Church in Oxford and later in the week give a keynote lecture at an ecumenical conference titled “Newman as Preached.”
The Rev. King is the author of two books. The first, Newman and the Alexandrian Fathers, won a Templeton Award for Theological Promise. The second is to be published soon under the title of The Oxford Movement and the People of God: Enslavement, Establishment, and Empire. He is also co-editor of Receptions of Newman and The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman. All these books are published by Oxford University Press.
He has written numerous articles and lectured internationally. He has contributed on Anglican topics to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church and serves on the editorial board of the journal Anglican and Episcopal History.
