Jennifer R. Ayres (Ph.D., Emory University) is Associate Professor of Religious Education at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Her research interests include religious environmental education, social activism and religious identity, faith formation in the context of popular culture, and feminist practical theology. She is the author of: Waiting for a Glacier to Move: Practicing Social Witness (Wipf and Stock, 2011), Good Food: Grounded Practical Theology (Baylor University Press, 2013), and Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education (Baylor University Press, 2019). Her current research, for which she received a grant from the Emory University Research Committee, investigates the educational task of cultivating Christian faith that is deeply rooted in ecological context.
James J. Butler, Jr. (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Senior Scientist in groundwater hydrology at the Kansas Geological Survey, a research and service unit of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. His research interests include the assessment of aquifers that support irrigated agriculture, well responses to natural and anthropogenic stimuli, and stream-aquifer interactions. He has written more than 80 scientific articles and book chapters and a technical reference book. Butler was the 2020 recipient of the M. King Hubbert Award of the National Ground Water Association.
Mari Joerstad (Ph.D., Duke University) is the Academic Dean and Professor of Hebrew Bible at Vancouver School of Theology, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia. Mari is a biblical scholar whose research focuses on ecology, land, migration, and belonging in the Hebrew Bible. She is the author of The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She has been a Research Associate at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, where she has provided support for the grant Facing the Anthropocene, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Carey K. Johnson (Ph.D., Iowa State University) is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas. His research interests include time-resolved and single-molecule spectroscopy applied to the dynamics of proteins. The newest frontier is to detect and track the dynamics and interactions of single molecules inside live cells, which bridges the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics. Broader interests include the intersection of science and Christian faith. He has authored more than 100 professional publications and is a member of the Wesleyan Church.
Nelci Nafalia Ndolu is a doctoral candidate at Duta Wacana Christian University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is an assistant professor of Old Testament in the Department of Christian Education at the Institut Agama Kristen Negeri (IAKN) Kupang. Her main research interests are eco-hermeneutics and gender hermeneutics, with water as the focus topic. She is developing a contextualized reading of the Hebrew Bible in conversation with water-related issues in Indonesia. She is affiliated with the Evangelical Church in Timor, East Nusa Tenggara (Gereja Masehi Injili di Timor).
Christiana Zenner (Ph.D., Yale University) is Associate Professor of Theology, Science, and Ethics and Affiliated Faculty in Environmental Studies at Fordham University-Lincoln Center, New York City. An anti-colonial feminist working in the environmental humanities, she is a scholar of modernity’s conceits in ecological science and religious ethics. Zenner is the author of Just Water: Theology, Ethics, and Fresh Water Crises (2014, rev. ed. 2018) and recently completed a three-year subgrant on the Anthropocene between scientific and religious imaginaries, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. She has published nearly 20 peer-reviewed articles on freshwater values, climate justice, religious ethics, and theology and science.
