Samford Professor One of 35 in World Selected for Templeton Oxford Seminars

Samford University business professor Thomas W. Woolley has been selected to participate in the John Templeton Oxford Seminars on Science and Christianity at Oxford University in England, beginning this summer. The seminars at Wycliffe Hall will span three consecutive summers, enabling faculty members to engage in scholarly research in science and religion and to have dialogue with each other about their scholarship. Thirty-five scholars from around the world were chosen. They represent a cross-section of nationalities and disciplines.

Dr. Woolley teaches statistics in the Samford School of Business. He was named Alabama Professor of the Year for 2000 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Woolley also won Samford’s top teaching award, the Buchanan Award, last fall. He holds undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from Florida State University, and is working on a Master of Theological Studies degree in Samford’s Beeson Divinity School.

He will work on a writing project entitled “Chance and the Evangelical Mind” at Oxford under the guidance of Dr. Alister McGrath, a biochemist and Reformation historian who is principal of Wycliffe Hall.

Interdisciplinary skills and leadership abilities were among the selection criteria for the Oxford seminars. “The participants selected represent a rich diversity of scholarly backgrounds as well as national, theological and church traditions,” said Dr. Ronald Mahurin, vice president of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities and a selection committee member.

Woolley has been at Samford since 1993. Previously, he taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he won the President’s Teaching Award in 1992, and at East Tennessee State University. Woolley was professor-in-residence at Daniel House, Samford’s London Study Centre, during the spring of 2001.

February 25, 2003