Mary SolbergEmeriti

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Solberg teaches historical and contemporary Christian theologies and ethics and medicine. Her teaching and research interests include the conduct of the Christian churches in Germany during the Third Reich; the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer; constructive theology; Luther; liberation theologies; God and gender; and bioethics. She has led numerous January-term travel courses on health care and education in developing countries.

Solberg is a former Fulbright fellow and a recipient of the Daniel Day Williams Fellowship awarded by Union Theological Seminary (NY). While completing her doctorate, she served as Project Editor of the 2nd edition of the five-volume Encyclopedia of Bioethics (Macmillan, 1995).  She is the author of Compelling Knowledge: A Feminist Proposal for an Epistemology of the Cross (SUNY Press, 1997), and has co-edited several books including Healing by Heart: Clinical and Ethical Case Stories of Hmong Families and Western Providers (Vanderbilt U. Press, 2003). Solberg translated Walter Altmann's Luther and Liberation: A Latin American Perspective(Fortress, 1992; Wipf & Stock, 2000). Her current project is A Church Undone: Selected Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940 (Fortress, forthcoming), translations of representative texts published by this Protestant pro-Nazi movement in Hitler's Germany.  Prof. Solberg is on the editorial board of dialog: a journal of theology.

Before becoming a teaching theologian, Solberg was a book editor, social worker, and refugee advocate. She established the Central American Concerns program at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.  As the first representative of the Lutheran World Federation's Department of World Service in Central America, she lived and worked in El Salvador during that country's civil war. Before coming to Gustavus in 1996, she taught at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. She is fluent in Spanish and German, sings Bach and Brahms, and works in stained glass.

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