What is a Dead Thelogians Society?
Last week I received an email from Bob Trube, InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry (GFM) Director, Ohio Valley. He shared with me Ohio State University’s Dead Theologians Society Reading List. What’s the inspiration? He “shamelessly stole the name and idea from Robbie Castleman, who led a group under this name when she was on GFM staff in Florida.”*
The Dead Theologians Society, or Delta Theta Sigma (DTS), started in the fall of 1990, on the campus of Florida State University, when some InterVarsity Christian Fellowship students began meeting weekly to discuss what they had each learned from reading Oswald Chambers’s devotional classic, My Utmost for His Highest.
Dead Poets Society was then a recent movie, and the students agreed that a Dead Theologians Society was needed to promote the serious discussion of some of the best in Christian literature.
To promote the Society, the Greek acronym Delta Theta Sigma was adopted for the designation of the Dead Theologians Society.
Since that time, this idea of “discipleship through the Christian classics” has spread quickly, and DTS reading groups continue to develop. – The Dead Theologians Society: Pursuing Discipleship through the Christian Classics (Online resource accessed 6/10/2013). Links added for additional resourcing.