SUSAN WILDS McARVER is in her eighth year as Associate Professor of Christian Education and Church History at at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary in Columbia SC, where she is also Director of the Center on Religion in the South. Her Ph.D. in American religious history is from Duke University, where her dissertation dealt with 'A Spiritual Wayside Inn’: Lutherans, the New South and Cultural Change in South Carolina, 1886-1918. Her particular scholarly interests include religion in the South and women’s history, two issues on which she does considerable reading, writing, and speaking.

Her recent scholarly works include “’Passing through Many a Hard School and Test’:  Confessions, Piety, Liberty and the Lutheran Experience in the United States,” in The Confessional Tradition in America (Eerdmans Press, forthcoming 2006) and A Goodly Heritage: The Story of Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary 1830 – 2005, co-authored with Scott Hendrix of Princeton Seminary, in honor of the LTSS's 175th anniversary.

She is married and the mother of three sons. Her children are tenth generation southern Lutheran, "a fact that always startles Midwestern Lutheran friends." She still has the charter from King George III granting her family the land in the 18th century in the Dutch Fork of South Carolina and they still own the land and the log cabin her ancestors built before the Civil War.