Shela Chan

Education

B.A. Asian Studies - University of Washington, 2011

M.Div. – Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2024

Biography

Shela Chan is a doctoral student in Theological and Social Ethics. Her scholastic focus resides at the nexus between an Augustinian metaphysics of love/delight, the embodied dimensions of social relationships and the unity of self. Putting these elements in dialogue with the liberation and ecclesial belonging of queer people, she is researching the social construction of minoritized LGBTQ subjectivities, currents, and structures of inferiorization in modern American Protestant Christian history. Specifically, she is interested in critically interrogating twentieth-century evangelical engagements with psychology. With this backdrop, she builds her constructive sexual ethical project through insights of attachment theory and collective trauma healing for a positive queer ethics of sacramental flourishing and generative channeling of eros. She holds these developments in view to explore what holiness in Christian practice means for the current milieu and as undergirded by a scientifically informed Biblical hermeneutic.

Shela completed her undergraduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle. After ministry work abroad in Afro-Eurasia, she returned to the States to attend seminary in the Boston area. She currently resides in Upper Manhattan. For leisure, she enjoys running, cycling, strength training and quality coffee.

Publications

Shela's publications include the following.

Review of Keri Day, Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic
Belonging, Religious Studies Review 52, August (2025). (Forthcoming).

Review of Luke Powery, Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race,
Religious Studies Review 50(4) December (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.17492open_in_new

Review of Gina Zurlo, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global
Movement, Missiology 52(1) January (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1177/00918296231209595