Eden welcomes its newest faculty member

The Reverend Dr. Laurel Koepf Taylor has joined the Eden faculty as Assistant Professor of Old Testament. At its May 3 meeting, Eden's board of trustees voted unanimously to call Dr. Taylor.

Taylor is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence University and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She recently completed her Ph.D. at Union and successfully defended her dissertation titled:  “Give me Children or I Shall Die”: Children and Survival in Biblical Literature.

“Dr. Taylor’s clear scholarly preparation and promise, her capacity to teach and her passion for it, and her clear commitment to the United Church of Christ, makes her an excellent candidate for a colleague on the Eden faculty," said the Reverend Dr. Deborah Krause, Academic Dean at Eden. "Given the mix of her scholarly, pedagogical, and ecclesial commitments and gifts she will be a powerful asset to our collegium as we work to build Eden as a center for the life of the Progressive Christian Movement.”

The Reverend Dr. Taylor is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ She has served congregations in Connecticut, Ohio and New York as an affiliated minister, youth minister, director of children and youth ministries, family faith mentor and religious education teacher. She has led workshops on welcoming children in worship as a practice of congregational vitality at the denomination’s General Synod meeting in 2011 as well as at the New York Annual Conference Meeting. She has served as an instructor and teaching fellow at Union Theological Seminary since 2007 and in 2011 won the Robert Wood Lynn Teaching award for a graduate student showing great promise as a teacher.