Amy L. Hall, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics

Please note: Amy has left the "Graduate Program in Religion" group at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Amy Laura Hall was named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 2004-2005 and has received funding from the Lilly Foundation, the Josiah Trent Memorial Foundation, the American Theological Library Association, the Child in Religion and Ethics Project, the Pew Foundation and the Project on Lived Theology.

At Duke University, Professor Hall has served on the steering committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center and as a faculty member for the FOCUS program of the Institute on Genome Sciences and Policy and for the FOCUS program on Global Health. She has served on the Duke Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board and as an ethics consultant to the V.A. Center in Durham. She served as a faculty adviser with the Duke Center for Civic Engagement (under Leela Prasad), on the Academic Council, and as a faculty advisor for the NCCU-Duke Program in African, African American & Diaspora Studies. She currently teaches with and serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee for Graduate Liberal Studies.

Professor Hall was the 2017 Scholar in Residence at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C., served on the Bioethics Task Force of the United Methodist Church, and has spoken to academic and ecclesial groups across the U.S. and Europe. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, Hall is a member of the Rio Texas Annual Conference. She has served both urban and suburban parishes. Her service with the community has included an initiative called Labor Sabbath, an effort with the AFL-CIO of North Carolina to encourage congregations of faith to talk about the usefulness of labor unions, and, from August 2013 to June 2017, a monthly column for the Durham Herald-Sun. Professor Hall organized a conference against torture in 2011, entitled “Toward a Moral Consensus Against Torture,” and a “Conference Against the Use of Drones in Warfare” October 20-21, 2017. In collaboration with the North Carolina Council of Churches and the United Methodist Church, she organized a workshop with legal scholar Richard Rothstein held October, 2018 and, in 2020, brought the exhibit “Waging Peace in Vietnam” to Duke University.

Amy Laura Hall is the author of four books: Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction, Writing Home with Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers, and Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich. Recent articles include "The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagements in Sociobiology," which was a keynote lecture given with Kara Slade at the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics in 2012, and "Torture and American Television," which appeared in the April 2013 issue of Muslim World, a volume that Hall guest-edited with Daniel Arnold. Her essay “Love in Everything: A Brief Primer to Julian of Norwich" appeared in volume 32 of The Princeton Seminary Bulletin. Word and World published her essay on heroism in the Winter 2016 edition, and her essay "His Eye Is on the Sparrow: Collectivism and Human Significance" is in a 2017 volume entitled Why People Matter with Baker Publishing. Her 2019 essay “Love: A Holy Caprice” appears in The T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard. Laughing at the Devil was the focus of her 2018 Simpson Lecture at Simpson College in Iowa and was featured at the 2019 Virginia Festival of the Book and at the 2019 Chautauqua Institution. Her substantial (5,500 word) entry on “Torture” will appear in Volume III (pp. 1399-1408) of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics. She writes for Religion Dispatches and is an author at Religion News Service. She continues work on a longer research project on masculinity and gender anxiety in mainstream, white evangelicalism and has begun research for a book length project on formal responses to 9/11 at major research universities during the early years of the “War on Terrorism.”

Contact Info:

Office Location:	Box 91200, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:
Web Page:	https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/amy-laura-hall

Teaching (Fall 2024):

• GLHLTH 189FS.01, GLOBAL HEALTH AND ETHICS Synopsis

  Crowell 107, MW 03:05 PM-04:20 PM

  (also cross-listed as SCISOC 189FS.01)

• XTIANETH 800.01, WAR-CHRISTIAN TRADITION Synopsis

  Divinity TBA, W 08:30 AM-11:00 AM

Education:

Ph.D.	Yale University	1999
M.Div.	Yale University	1993
B.A.	Emory University	1990

Keywords:

Abortion--Religious aspects--Christianity • Advertising as Topic • Bioethics • Caregivers • Child • Child Rearing • Children with disabilities • Christianity • Church and social problems--Protestant churches • Cloning, Organism • Criticism and interpretation • Democracy • Disease • Drug Industry • Embryo Disposition • Embryo Research • Embryo, Mammalian • Embryo, Nonmammalian • Emotions • Empathy • Essays • Eugenics • Family • Fear • Genetic Engineering • God--Love • Gratitude • Health Services for the Aged • Human Rights • Interpersonal Relations • Justice • Kinship • Love • Love--Religious aspects • Mass Media • Men • Mercy • Mothers • Mystical union • North America • Parents • People with disabilities • Philosophy • Race • Religion • Religion and Science • Religious aspects • Repentance • Research Embryo Creation • Spiritual life • Stem Cells • Terminal Care • Theological anthropology--Christianity--History of doctrines • Theology • Women

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Hall, A, Love., in T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard (February, 2019), T&T Clark, ISBN 9780567667076  [abs]
2. Hall, AL, Laughing at the Devil Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (August, 2018), pp. 144 pages, Duke University Press, ISBN 9781478002109  [abs]
3. Hall, A, His Eye is on the Sparrow: Collectivism and Human Significance., in Why People Matter A Christian Engagement with Rival Views of Human Significance (January, 2017), pp. 39-63, Baker Academic, ISBN 9781493406623  [abs]
4. Hall, AL, Writing Home, With Love Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers (December, 2016), pp. 136 pages, Wipf and Stock Publishers, ISBN 9781498282635  [abs]
5. Hall, A, Love in Everything: A Brief Primer to Julian of Norwich., The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, vol. 32 no. 1 (2015), pp. 83-95