Lucas Schulte

Dr. Lucas Schulte is the Director of Education and Outreach at the Tri-Faith Initiative, where he combines his expertise in religious pluralism with innovative engagement strategies. Born on a small Nebraska farm, his passion for interfaith dialogue began in high school, leading him to pursue a BA in Comparative Religious Studies (UNL), an MA in Religion from Yale University Divinity School, and a PhD in Religion from Claremont Graduate University, specializing in Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and ancient Near Eastern studies. While at Claremont, Luke helped co-found and co-chaired the Religions in Conversation Conference, an annual interfaith conference that ran from 2007 to 2016. He also worked summers as part of international teams of scholars on archaeological excavations in Israel at Ramat Raḥel (near Jerusalem) in 2008 and 2009 and Tell Akko (near Acre) in 2010.

For ten years, Luke taught undergraduate and graduate students as an adjunct professor of religion at a wide range of colleges, universities, and seminaries, such as Pomona College, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Eden Theological Seminary (to name a few). In 2016, he published a book on interfaith elements in the biblical book of Nehemiah within the historical, sociological, and religious contexts of the first Persian Empire. More recently Luke has contributed the chapter “The Book of Isaiah in the Persian Period” in the recently published book The Cambridge Companion to the Book of Isaiah by Cambridge University Press. Luke was thrilled to join the Tri-Faith Initiative in January 2023 to engage full-time in the kind of inter-faith work for which he had been preparing for the past 20 years.

Outside work, Luke enjoys biking, cooking (sometimes too enthusiastically), helping on his family’s farm, and sharing his love of books, Star Trek, and K-dramas with his wife and two kids.