Jarvis Streeter, Ph.D.
Honorary Alumni
Dr. Jarvis Streeter has been teaching in the CLU Religion Department for 25 years, since the fall of 1988. He holds degrees from the University of Southern California (B.A., sociology), Luther Seminary (M.Div.), Yale University Divinity School (S.T.M.), and Southern Methodist University (Ph.D.) and also spent a year at Yale as a Research Fellow. He has lectured widely, giving more than 400 public lectures since arriving at CLU. Streeter has taught in a remote Kenyan village, participated in an archaeological dig at Caesarea Maritima in Israel, and been a member or chair of the board of several nonprofit groups. Currently, he serves as president of the board of the Kingsmen Shakespeare Company, the professional theater company of CLU, and as a member of the Steering Committee of the Association of Teaching Theologians of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
A specialist in Christian theology, Streeter has also taught CLU courses in biblical studies, church history, ethics and global religions. His main research interests center on historical Jesus studies, the person and work of Christ, the doctrines of God, creation, human nature and sin, and especially the relationship between science and theology. Thus his first book, Human Nature, Human Evil and Religion, dealt with the relationship between traditional Christian thought on human nature and sin and the theories of human nature and motivation in the social sciences, while the book he is currently finishing, God and the History of the Universe, deals with the interplay of theology and the natural sciences.
Apart from his professional life, Streeter engages in a wide variety of interests, including playing (and formerly writing) rock music, creating an audiophile stereo and home theater system, home and landscape architecture, travel, food and wine, and fulfilling a lifelong goal to read every significant piece of literature ever written. He and his wife Susan, now retired, have two daughters who live and work in Florida and Cambodia and two young grandchildren.