CAAC: About the Director
Dr. David C. Chao
Director of the Center for Asian American Christianity
Dr. David C. Chao is the director of the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary. He teaches courses on Asian American theology and organizes academic programming in Asian American theology and ministry. His research and writing focus on Asian American theology, the uses of Christian doctrine for liberation, the convergence and divergence of Protestant and Catholic dogmatics, and the theology of Karl Barth.
His first book, titled Concursus and Concept Use in Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Providence, is under contract with Routledge. He is grant co-author and project editor for the $300,000 translation grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Karl Barth Translator’s Seminar. He is co-leader of a $250,000 Henry Luce grant project titled “Religiously-Inspired Asian American Coalitional Justice Work.” He is principal investigator of a Louisville Institute-funded project titled “Stories of Faith, Resilience, and Politics: First-Generation East Asian American Christians.”
Chao is a graduate of Yale University (BA), Regent College (MDiv), and Princeton Theological Seminary (ThM, PhD). He is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Association for Asian American Studies. Chao has a wide range of pastoral experience with Chinese American, Korean American, and Pan-Asian churches and ministries and is an active member of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Read his article “Evangelical or Mainline? Doctrinal Similarity and Difference in Asian American Christianity: Sketching a Social-Practical Theory of Christian Doctrine” here. You can also check out “The 1517 Project and World Christianity: Migration and the Uses of Doctrine” here or download the free PDF version here. This paper was presented at the 2023 Asian American Theology Conference “Multiple Belongings in Transpacific Christianities: Christian Faith and Asian Migration to the US.”
