Julian Sieber
3rd Year PhD Student
Julian Sieber is a Theology Ph.D. candidate in New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola University Chicago and holds an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and a B.A. in Film & Television from Curtin University in Western Australia. In his dissertation, titled “Autochthonous Narratives: The Politics and Poetics of Land-Based Epistemologies in the Acts of the Apostles,” he seeks to better describe the complex positionalities of the text at the specific intersection of politics, religion, and conceptualizations of the environmental and imperial spatiality. To this end, he employs a decolonial hermeneutic that draws upon a variety of modern scholarship on indigenous land-based religious traditions and indigenous literature, complicating Western settler colonial presuppositions of land, space, and the environment as mere background scenery to theological ideas. He argues that Acts articulates a complex poetics of land that echoes, yet attempts to distance itself from, certain diverse strands of land oriented Second Temple Judaism. This serves to gain sociopolitical clout within the Greco-Roman world around the turn of the 2nd century C.E. and preempts the consciously land-disoriented theology of many influential early Christian theologians.
Research Interests
New Testament Narrative Criticism, Indigenous and Land-Based Religions, Decolonial Hermeneutics, Ecotheology, the Ancient Novel, Reception History, Catholicism, Vatican II
Professional Employment
Research Assistant at the Joan & Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage
Professional/Community Affiliations
Catholic Biblical Association; Chicago Society of Biblical Research; European Academy of Religion; Society of Biblical Literature; Theta Alpha Kappa National Honor Society for Religious Studies/Theology
Publications/Research Listings
“Sister Septuagint: Virginal Allusions as Textual Apologetic in De vita Mosis,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 87.2 (2025).
“John in the Acts of John,” in The Reception of John’s Gospel. Baylor University Press, 2027 (forthcoming).
Editor, Dei Verbum at 60: Rediscovering the Word of God Ever Anew, Nexus (Chicago: The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, 2025)
Review of Tina M. Sherman, Plant Metaphors in Prophetic Condemnations of Israel and Judah. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2023. Review of Biblical Literature. May 17, 2024.
Selected Presentations
“’This Jesus was an Indian’: Decolonial Biblical Hermeneutics in Charles Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916),” 2025 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Program Unit: Postcolonial Studies and Biblical Studies, Boston, November 22¬–25, 2025.
“No More Smeared Walls and Tattooed Degenerates: New Jerusalem Aesthetics in Adolf Loos’ Modernist Manifesto,” 2025 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Program Unit: John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern, Boston, November 22¬–25, 2025.
“Towards a Decolonial Land-Based Biblical Hermeneutic,” Midwest Consortium on Ancient Religion (MiCAR), University of Chicago, November 8-9, 2025.
Facilitator, book review Panel: Michael Peppard, How Catholics Encounter the Bible, 87th International Meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, Chicago, August 2, 2025.
“Wisdom Lives in Wells: Knowledge as Gift of God and the Earth in Second Temple Judaism,” 2024 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Program Unit: Nature Imagery and Conceptions of Nature in the Bible, San Diego, November 23¬–26, 2024.
“God’s Chthonic Footstool: The Earth as Domain of Disability and Death in Acts of the Apostles” 2024 Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Program Unit: Book of Acts, San Diego, November 23¬–26, 2024.
“Translating Indigeneity in Acts 28:1–10,” Midwest Regional Meeting for Biblical Studies, Section: Early Christianity: Acts, Apostolic Fathers, and Patristics. South Bend, March 16, 2024.
“The Hope of Vanity: Legacy as Duty of Care in Qoheleth and Australia's Response to Climate Change,” Theology in the City Biblical Colloquium. Concordia University, September 27, 2022.
Awards
The Hank Fellowships in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (2025); Scholarship for the SCU Sustainability and Justice Workshops (June 23–27 & July 7–11, 2025); Julia A. Archibald High Scholarship Prize, Yale Divinity School (2022); Two Brothers Fellowship, Yale Divinity School (2022); The Plymouth Union-Prince Scholarship (2019–2021)