About

Jacob Alan Cook is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and Co-Director of the Shalom Collaboratory. This program creates new theological formation spaces to promote practices that make for just peace. He teaches courses and facilitates workshops around moral formation and discernment, adaptive leadership and tough conversations, and studying and developing local communities, as well as introductory courses in theology, ethics, and philosophy.

Jake also serves as a senior research fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre, where he works with and advises PhD students.

His first book, Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith (Fortress Academic, 2021), is an interdisciplinary study that brings together historical theology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy to show critical flaws in American evangelical worldview theory and to offer a constructive alternative, grounded in the theology and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And Jake’s current project is a practical theology of freedom and agency that builds constructively from the radical, little-b baptist tradition to be published in the Perspectives on Baptist Identities series jointly produced by Mercer University Press and the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion. Jake has also published, presented, and taught around topics like a theology of identity, theories of (non)violence, formation for peacemaking, and adaptive leadership.

He earned his PhD in Christian Ethics from Fuller Theological Seminary, where he studied with the great Baptist peacemaker, Glen Harold Stassen, and served as the associate director of the Just Peacemaking Initiative. He wrote his dissertation under the direction of G. Tommy Givens and David P. Gushee.

Prior to his work with Eastern Mennonite Seminary, Jake led research on moral formation as a teacher-scholar postdoctoral fellow at Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

He is ordained to the gospel ministry by a church affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and regularly serves churches as a teacher, facilitator, and consultant.