A trailblazing educator whose vision has shaped generations of African American religious leadership and an eminent historian of Christianity are the 2025 Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion Distinguished Alumni/ae.
Nominated by their peers, mentors and community members, the Rev. Forrest Harris, MDiv’83, DMin’91, is this year’s recipient for the Divinity School, while Mark Noll, MA’74, PhD’75, is being honored by the Graduate Department of Religion.
“We are exceptionally proud of these alumni, whose remarkable contributions to theological and historical scholarship, teaching and leadership are at the heart of our mission,” said Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School. “I look forward to celebrating their achievements during the Divinity School’s 150th anniversary reunion.”
Harris, professor of the practice of ministry and director of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies at the Divinity School, has worked tirelessly to bridge academic theology with practical ministry needs of the church.
As a master of divinity student in the early 1980s, Harris’ career path was influenced by the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith Sr., noted civil rights activist and then-Divinity School assistant dean, and Peter J. Paris, world-renowned scholar and former Divinity School professor, among others. Harris earned a master of divinity in 1983 and a doctor of ministry in 1991, receiving the Florence Conwell Prize for outstanding work in the area of preaching.
Harris was the school’s dean for student life before joining the faculty in 1996. His teaching and research interests include the liberation justice tradition in Black religious pursuits, the Black religious experience as expressed through worship and preaching, and social justice movements of the Black Church.
As director of KMSI, he has brought Black churches, African American communities and the Divinity School into partnership to examine faith and ministry issues. Harris coordinated a national ecumenical dialogue involving more than 12,000 people, launched a Theology and Ministry Project for congregations and established Vanderbilt Divinity School as institutional host for the first online Lectionary for African American Churches.
For more than 25 years Harris also served as president of American Baptist College, where he elevated the school’s national profile, leading efforts to strengthen its accreditation, secure significant funding, and advance the school’s legacy as a training ground for vocations in social justice advocacy. Harris was named president emeritus recently, placing him among the longest serving HBCU leaders.
Harris’ influential books include Ministry for Social Crisis: Theology and Praxis in the Black Church Tradition; What Does it Mean to be Black and Christian? Pulpit, Pew, and Academy in Dialogue; and Survival of a Whole People: The Meaning of the African American Church.
Harris’ leadership and scholarship are being honored with The Unfinished Dream: The Black Leadership Religious Tradition in America, a collection of essays edited by Riggins R. Earl Jr., MDiv’69, PhD’78. Contributors include the Rev. James Lawson and VDS professors Victor Anderson, Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Herbert Marbury.
Harris said the opportunity to carry on Kelly Miller Smith’s legacy of theological and academic excellence and prophetic witness has been a tremendous honor. “I am deeply inspired by Smith, Lawson, Katie Cannon, Jacqueline Grant, Gayraud Wilmore and many other activist theologians,” he said.
Harris continues to guide new generations of social justice-minded, praxis-engaged leaders at VDS while maintaining his commitment to engage scholars, congregations and others on critical social ministry needs in Nashville and beyond.
Throughout his academic career, Noll has been a prolific author, co-author and editor of more than 30 books on American religious history. He has achieved significant success in writing from two different perspectives. The first is as an academic on the history of Christianity in the United States and Canada. He wrote America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, one of the most influential academic studies of theology in America.
He also writes as a modern evangelical, by religious persuasion, about evangelical matters for a lay audience. An example of the latter is The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, an award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement.
Noll enrolled in the Vanderbilt Graduate Department of Religion in 1972, earning a master of arts in 1974 and a doctorate in the history of Christianity in 1975. Guided by adviser Richard Wolf and professors Jack Forstman and Dale Johnson, the GDR fostered intellectual growth and development that shaped his understanding of American religious history. Courses with notable historians Paul Hardacre and Douglas Leach further influenced his scholarship.
He began his teaching career at Wheaton College, where he co-founded the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals. In 2006, he joined the University of Notre Dame faculty.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Noll has taught American religious and intellectual history, the Reformation, world Christianity, and Christianity and science, among other courses. Noll was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America in 2005 and awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal in 2006.
Reflecting on the perspective he gained in the GDR and a career spanning more than four decades, Noll said, “Over the years it’s been a delight to continue finding new dimensions of how the Christian faith impacts its setting, and then how Christianity, in turn, has been shaped by its environment.”
His research interests have expanded from the history of Protestantism, the Bible, and North Atlantic evangelicalism to African American Christianity and Christian faiths in non-Western nations.
Noll, who has retired as professor emeritus at Notre Dame and Wheaton College, is among the nation’s leading historians on evangelicalism in America. He has enhanced the scholarship of his peers while deepening our understanding of the wide range of evangelicals’ convictions, attitudes and world impact.
Alumni, students, faculty, staff, and community members are invited to help celebrate these distinguished alumni/ae at the Vanderbilt Divinity School 150th Anniversary Reunion, happening Nov. 6–8. Register now.