Julia Fogg, Ph.D.

Professor

Book this person as a speaker:

Email: fogg@callutheran.edu

Speeches:

• Women and the Bible

• Saint Paul

• Jesus' World

• The Apocalypse: What the Bible really means?

The Rev. Dr. Julia Lambert Fogg is a full Professor in the Religion Department. She specializes in the New Testament, first century Christianity, theologies from the margins, border crossing narratives, and cross-cultural reading practices. Named Professor of the Year by CLU class of 2008, she led the Religion department for 7 years as Chair (2009-2016). She has also served in faculty governance as Faculty Assembly chair and as Chair of the inaugural CLU Faculty Senate (2020-21).

In her teaching Dr. Fogg follows culturally responsive pedagogies and attends to neurodiversity in student learning practices. She works to develop innovative, immersive, and relational pedagogical methods, and employs experiential learning to take students on community visits in courses like Pauline letters, Global Jesus, New Testament, and Liberation Theology. She believes that learning is most transformative when we step outside our comfort zones to engage people and communities who are different from us. 

Dr. Fogg's current research focuses on strategies for building communities across divisions and diversity for a book project tentatively titled, Creating Bodies: St. Paul's Strategies for Saving Communities, 2027 Baylor University Press. For example, "A Neurocognitive Approach Reveals Paul's Embodied Emotional Strategies," Religions 2024, 15(8), 946. Other projects include: "Neuro-cognition and Joy in Philippians: Paul's Emotional Strategies for Building the Body of Christ," a paper accepted at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in San Diego, Nov 2024; a forthcoming chapter, “Called into Relationship: Creating Teaching and Learning Communities in College Classrooms Today” for the Network on Vocation in Undergraduate Education' next book, expected 2025; a forthcoming article, “The Kind of Reception We Had Among You: Practicing Hospitality in the Pauline Letters” for the Chicago Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture in February 2025, to be published in the journal Ex Auditu.

Fogg's first book, Finding Jesus at the Border: Opening Our Hearts to the Stories of Our Immigrant Neighbors focuses on biblical readings from the margins (Baker-Brazos Press. April 2020). Here she examines border crossing narratives in the gospels and shows how these narratives illumine and are illumined by the experiences of young Latino/a immigrants who crossed borders to arrive in Southern California.

In earlier work on Paul’s letters, especially Philippians, Dr. Fogg argues that Paul understands salvation in terms of a present and future, material and spiritual, social communion between Christ and his followers embodied in their concrete daily practices. This puts community life at the center of theology and engaged practices.

Dr. Fogg has taught for 8 years in the Lutheran Theological Education for Emerging Ministries (TEEM) program at CLU's seminary, PLTS in Berkeley. In her public scholarship, she has written for Working Preacher.org in Spanish and Vocation Matters as well as Leadership Foundations, and "The Story of Scripture" for the Practicing Discipleship Initiative for Lutheran Youth and worked for a time with a nonprofit farm for land, farmworker, and food justice, The Abundant Table in Ventura County.