Dr John Olson
Lecturer in Modern and Systematic Theology
Dr John Olson
Lecturer in Modern and Systematic Theology
John is currently serving as Departmental Lecturer in Modern and Systematic Theology. Originally from Nebraska in the United States, he received his DPhil from Oxford in 2022, working under Professor Joel Rasmussen on Martin Heidegger and the Christian doctrine of revelation. He has been teaching at Oxford since 2020, offering tutorials in Systematic Theology, Christian Ethics, Science & Religion, the Nature of Religion, and Themes in Nineteenth Century Theology & Religion. He has lectured on Systematic Theology in the past and is currently overseeing the lectures for the 19th century paper (Theology and Its Discontents from the Revolutionary Era to the First World War).
Research interests
His research interests centres on the intersection of phenomenology, embodied cognition, and theological epistemology. His first book, Taste and See: Eucharist as Revelation in Phenomenological Perspective, was released in 2023. There he argue that Christians know the person of Christ most intimately through embodied activity in the sacramental world. His current research develops these themes in a phenomenology of sin in the information age, suggesting that the modern disembodiment of truth reveals something distinctive about the human predicament which can illuminate classical theological definitions of sin.
Books
- J. W. Olson, Taste and See: Eucharist as Revelation in Phenomenological Perspective, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023).