The Twenty-First Annual David and Marilyn Knutson Lecture
“Reading the Bible within the Community of Creation.”
Dr. T. Christopher Hoklotubbe (Bexley Seabury Seminary)
Tuesday November 10, 2026
7:00 PM (Pacific)
Scandinavian Cultural Center (in the Anderson University Center)
PLU
The lecture will be live-streamed on PLU’s YouTube channel
Contact: Dr. Agnes Choi, Chair of the Religion Department, choiaa@plu.edu
Free and Open to the Public
The twenty-first annual David and Marilyn Knutson Lecture will be given by Dr. T. Christopher Hoklotubbe (Bexley Seabury Seminary). The title of his lecture is, “Reading the Bible within the Community of Creation.” The lecture will begin at 7:00 PM.
What changes when we read the Bible as part of a larger community that includes the earth and our more-than-human kin?
This lecture explores what difference an Indigenous perspective that embraces creational kinship brings to interpreting Christian Scripture. For example, Chris will survey biblical stories and descriptions concerning “the land” and show how ancient Hebrew relationships with and understandings of land resonate with Indigenous life ways and values.
Reading the Bible alongside of Indigenous stories can illuminate the ancient significance of these stories for their earliest audiences in ways that modern Western readings have often obscured.
Speaker Biography
Dr. T. Christopher Hoklotubbe (Choctaw) is Director of the Indigenous Theological Circle & Associate Professor of Indigenous Theological Studies at Bexley Seabury Seminary and NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community. He holds a Th.D. in New Testament and Early Christianity and M.Div. from Harvard University Divinity School. He is the author of the international award-winning, Civilized Piety: The Rhetoric of Pietas in the Pastoral Epistles and the Roman Empire (Baylor Press, 2017). He lives in Iowa, on the ancestral lands of the Báxoje (Ioway), with his wife and two daughters.
Dr. Hoklotubbe is a co-author of Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to North American Indigenous Interpretation (IVP Academic, 2025)—one of the first books on Native American interpretations of the Bible.
Previous Knutson Lecturers
2019 – Jennifer Graber
2018 – Kelly Brown Douglas
2017 – Ulrich Duchrow
2016 – Jennifer Harvey
2015 – Darren Dochuk
2014 – Monica Coleman
2013 – John Collins
2012 – Robert N. Bellah
2011 – Marcus J. Borg
2010 – Mark Brocker
2009 – John Dominic Crossan
2008 – Susan Ross
2007 – John Pahl
2006 – Martin E. Marty
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