Isaac Horwedel is Visiting Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics and a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2025). He received his MDiv from Candler School of Theology and his PhD from Emory University. Prior to his doctoral studies, Isaac co-founded a recovery community where he worked and lived as the Program Director. His teaching and research sit at the intersection of Christian ethics, practical and pastoral theology, and critical theory.

Horwedel is currently working on a book manuscript that provides a critical analysis of the phenomenon of addiction and its dominant theories. Countering traditional theories of addiction as an individual, exceptional, pathology, he argues that addiction emerges within our compulsions to pursue normative social standards as they are made available, and necessarily undermined, in capitalist society. Not reducible to an individual pathology or state of exception, addiction expresses the particular way in which our compulsory participation in capitalist society necessarily reproduces destructive personal and social outcomes through our very attempts to live well. Work based on this research has appeared in Pastoral Psychology and been presented at the American Academy of Religion.

Education

• PhD, Emory University
• MDiv, Candler School of Theology, Emory University
• BA, Anderson University (IN)