Deanna A. Thompson is Director of the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values and Community and Martin E. Marty Regents Chair in Religion and the Academy. Thompson’s work at St. Olaf focuses on articulating and enacting a “Lutheran and interreligious” vision for the Center, the college, and beyond. Her recent article, “Delighting in our Neighbors  Who are Non-Religious: A Lutheran Theological Proposal,” addresses the reality that work across religious lines must also take into account the growing number of people who identify as non-religious. 

Thompson’s most recent scholarly work focuses on vocation, sadness, and trauma. Her chapter “Beyond Deep Gladness: Lamenting Trauma, Injustice and Suffering the Service of the Flourishing of All,” is part of Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good (OUP, 2024), and her chapter, “Vocation, Deep Sadness, and Hope in a Virtual Real World” is included in the new volume on Lutheran Higher Education entitled, So That All May Flourish: the Aims of Lutheran Higher Education (Fortress, 2023). She also has a piece on vocation and sadness in Christian Century.

The author of five books, Thompson’s Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross (Fortress, 2004) was one of the first to bring Martin Luther’s theology into sustained conversation with feminist thought. Since her 2008 diagnosis of incurable cancer, Thompson has written Hoping for More: Having Cancer, Talking Faith, and Accepting Grace (Cascade 2012), a theo-memoir on living with cancer; The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World (Abingdon, 2016) on how digital tools can help the church better live its mission of caring for those who suffer; and Glimpsing Resurrection: Trauma, Cancer, and Ministry (Westminster John Knox, 2018), a text that uses research on illness-related trauma to explore places in the Christian story for those undone by serious illness and help them glimpse resurrection. In 2014 Thompson also published a theological commentary on the biblical book of Deuteronomy for the Westminster John Knox Belief commentary series and was awarded “Reference Book of the Year” by the Academy of Parish Clergy. In addition, Thompson’s writings have appeared in the Huffington Post, Christian Century, Living Lutheran and Gather. She is a sought-after speaker nationally and internationally, speaking at colleges and universities, and at seminaries and synods across the U.S. and Canada.

Thompson is currently the co-chair of the Faculty Working Group for the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities. She has held leadership positions in the American Academy of Religion (AAR), serving as President of the AAR’s Upper Midwest Region for six years and on the AAR Board of Directors for eight. Prior to coming to St. Olaf in 2019, she taught religion at Hamline University for more than two decades, receiving teaching and scholarship awards from students, faculty, alumni and the Hamline Board of Trustees. In 2016 she was inducted into the Burnsville High School Hall of Fame. When she’s not writing, speaking or teaching, Thompson can be found hiking in a national park with her husband and two children.