Josef Sykora
Dean of School of Theology & Northeastern Seminary
"To grow, plants, as well as humans and communities, need to have deep roots. Within the Great Conversation series, I am inviting students to join me on a journey throughout the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian Era to find nuggets of wisdom that could illuminate our often messy and unsettled lives. In a dialogue over the insights from the great mothers and fathers of faith, we then discover where to stretch our roots to bring fruit to those around us."
Profile
Dr. Sykora’s earned degrees include a Ph.D. from Durham University in the United Kingdom; M.A. in biblical studies and M.A. in theological studies from Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky; and a Master in Law from Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic.
Dr. Sykora research revolves around three interwoven questions:
How shall we make sense of the violence sanctioned by the benevolent God of the Bible?
How can the biblical text be helpfully illuminated by subsequent theological thinking?
How shall we understand God's preference for some individuals or groups of people and what does it mean for those who are "unfavored."
In the past, Dr. Sykora served as a pastor in Bratislava, Slovakia, and as a Free Methodist missionary responsible for theological training in Europe. He remains involved in projects that attempt to articulate the Christian faith in the increasingly post-Christian and post-secular context of Central Europe.