Stephanie Lobdell
Stephanie Lobdell serves as Director of Spiritual Life and University Chaplain at Denison University, where she works with students, faculty, and staff to cultivate a vibrant and inclusive spiritual life on campus. A pastor, scholar, author, and educator, Stephanie is passionate about creating spaces where people can explore questions of faith, meaning, vocation, and what it means to live a life of purpose.
Before coming to Denison, Stephanie served in pastoral and university ministry settings, where she developed programs in spiritual formation, service-learning, retreats, worship, and community-building. Her ministry has included working with students from a wide range of Christian traditions and creating opportunities for people of different faiths — and those who are unsure about faith — to engage one another with curiosity, generosity, and respect.
Stephanie earned her doctorate from Duke Divinity School, where her research explored the relationship between trauma, meaning-making, and Christian theology. Her doctoral work, A Wesleyan Framework for Posttraumatic Meaning-Making, examines how Christian understandings of transformation, hope, and the life of faith can help people make meaning in the aftermath of suffering. She also holds degrees from MidAmerica Nazarene University and Nazarene Theological Seminary.
Stephanie is the author of Signs of Life: Resurrecting Hope from Ordinary Losses and co-author of Belong: Retracing the Path of God’s Embracing Love, as well as several devotional resources. Her writing and teaching often explore the places where ordinary life, Christian faith, suffering, hope, and spiritual practice meet.
At the heart of Stephanie’s work is a conviction that spiritual life is not about having all the answers. Rather, it is about learning to ask better questions, attending to the presence of God in our lives and communities, and discovering practices that help us become more fully who we are called to be. She especially enjoys helping students navigate the questions and transitions that accompany college life and encouraging them to imagine lives marked by curiosity, compassion, courage, and hope.
Research
Stephanie Lobdell’s research explores the intersection of trauma, meaning-making, and Christian theology, with particular attention to how people reconstruct their understanding of life following experiences of profound disruption and suffering. Psychological research on posttraumatic meaning-making demonstrates that trauma can challenge deeply held assumptions about the self, the world, and the future, prompting individuals to revise their frameworks of meaning. Yet much of this scholarship operates within a predominantly psychological or secular framework, leaving underexplored the role that transcendence, religious belief, and theological understandings of human flourishing may play in meaning-making after trauma.
Lobdell’s research brings these conversations into dialogue with Wesleyan theology. Her doctoral work, A Wesleyan Framework for Posttraumatic Meaning-Making, investigates how Wesleyan theological concepts of sanctification, theosis, grace, and new creation might expand contemporary understandings of posttraumatic meaning-making. Particular attention is given to the relationship between meaning and telos: how people’s capacity to make meaning is shaped not only by their interpretations of the past, but also by their orientation toward a hoped-for future.
This research contributes to interdisciplinary conversations among psychology, theology, and practical theology by considering meaning-making as a process involving the whole person — not only cognition, but also desire, affect, relationships, practices, and embodied participation in communities. It asks how Christian practices and theological resources might contribute to processes of healing and transformation without imposing simplistic explanations for suffering or assuming that trauma itself has a predetermined purpose.
More broadly, Lobdell’s research examines how Christian theology can engage contemporary understandings of human suffering while offering resources for hope, transformation, and lives of meaning.
Works
- Signs of Life: Resurrecting Hope from Ordinary Losses
- Belong: Retracing the way of God’s Embracing Love
- Sacred Invitations
- Lenten Postcards
- Various articles for publication