Rev. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, 2015 Alum Award for Distinguished Ministry in Special Service

Rev. Dr. Denton-Borhaug

Rev. Dr. Denton-Borhaug was born and raised in Glendale, where Pastor Bud Roufs of Salem Lutheran Church told her to consider becoming a pastor.  She notes the many others who also went to seminary from that congregation, including David Webb, Daniel Parr and Leanne Stubbs.  (Her youth pastor was Roland Martinson, later to teach at Luther Seminary.)  Kelly attended Cal State Northridge where she studied English Literature with concentrations in Spanish and Music.

Upon entering PLTS in 1983, she discovered the spirit of a liberal arts college, where there exists a close relationship with professors, the encouragement of free inquiry and care for the whole person.  She also became aware of liberation and feminist theologies, doing her field work at Faith American Lutheran Church in Oakland and St. Mary and Martha Lutheran Church in San Francisco.

While she was finishing seminary, she married Gunnar Borhaug, became pregnant with her first child and ran into the unfamiliarity and discomfort with women candidates for ministry.  A bishop suggested to her that she temporarily abandon her call and go home to have her baby.  Falling through the cracks, she knocked on doors until she got a job as administrator for a urologist in Oakland.

In the meantime, Kelly did interim pastoring at Golden Gate Lutheran Church and St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in San Francisco.  And she began doctoral study at the Graduate Theological Union in the area of Inter-Area studies.  She combined systematic theology and social ethics, eventually doing a mapping of liberation and feminist critique of atonement theology, based on social location and stated commitment to Christianity.  Dr. Martha Stortz was her dissertation director.

Kelly became a chaplain at Stanford University during her studies, where she worked closely with a Muslim imam, a woman rabbi and a gay African-American Episcopal priest.   Together they held exciting symposia on subjects such as sacrifice, interfaith marriage and the stress of the academic environment on woman.  She became interim Dean for Religious Life for two years.

Sensing a need to move, she accepted a joint position in teaching and chaplaincy at Goucher College near Baltimore, Maryland in 2000.  The events of 9/11/2001 hit her hard, especially as she noted the surging of sacrificial rhetoric and practices in preparation for war with, well, eventually Afghanistan and Iraq.  This thinking led to her first book in 2011, entitled War Culture: Sacrifice and Salvation.

In 2005, Kelly took a position at Moravian college in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she is currently Associate Professor of Religion and Chair of the department, as well as co-director of the Minor in Peace and Justice Studies.  Last year, she organized a conference of four schools on “From War to Peace: Drawing on the Power of Dialogue and Narrative.”  Participants considered the human, environmental and financial costs of ongoing US war, both at home and internationally.  She is currently at work on her second book, Moral Injury and Cultural Violence: Seeing War through a New Lens.  She will attempt to explore the phenomenology of moral injury as a flashpoint with the power to reveal truths about the realities of war that many of us Americans are good at concealing from ourselves, thereby freeing us for further considerations and ministry with military service members and veterans.