Rev. Kathryn House (she/her), Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Practical Theology and Chair of the Rev. Dr. Lee Barker Professorship of Leadership Studies at Meadville Lombard Theological School. Kathryn was formerly Visiting Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. She served as the Project Director of the Myrtle Collaboration, an Innovation Hub of the Called to Lives of Meaning and Purpose Initiative, at Louisville Seminary. Kathryn completed her Theological Studies and Master of Divinity at Boston University School of Theology. While at the School of Theology, she was Assistant Director of the Center for Practical Theology and Instructional Coordinator for Distance Learning Initiatives.

Kathryn’s research interests include prophetic religious leadership, evangelical purity culture, liberation theologies, religious trauma, theologies of vocation, practical theology, and Baptist theology. She is co-editor, with Dr. Sara Moslener, of the special issue of Theology and Sexuality entitled "Purity Culture and its Discontents,” and co-author, with Dr. Elizabeth Gish, of a significant bibliography on purity culture as part of the special issue. Kathryn is co-editor, with Dr. Rady Roldán-Figueroa, of the special issue “Essays in Honor of Nancy Tatom Ammerman" in Perspectives in Religious Studies. She has contributed chapters to the edited volumes Trauma and Lived Religion: Transcending the Ordinary (Palgrave Macmillan) and Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay (White Cloud Press).

Her current project, an expansion of her dissertation The Afterlife of White Evangelical Purity Culture: Wounds, Legacies, and Impacts, investigates the theological legacies of white evangelical purity culture (WEPC) and the construction of white womanhood and proposes a Baptist theology of baptism as a practice of solidarity in response. Her project foregrounds the passionate evangelical millennialism of antebellum female moral reformers’ efforts to curb prostitution between 1834 and 1838; the faith-based activism of women who fought to end, as well as to foment, racial terror lynchings in the United States; and contemporary criticisms and constructive ethics of the most recent purity movement known as evangelical purity culture. It also considers recent resonant debates over dissonant deployments of bodily and religious freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches, USA, and the Alliance of Baptists, Kathryn is a member of the Board of the Centre for Faith, Art, and Justice and the former Pastor for Christian Formation at the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, MA. She is the past President of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion Region-at-Large and a member of the Steering Committee of the Ecclesial Practices Unit of the American Academy of Religion.