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SVC alumna Elizabeth Elin wins 2024 Clark Award for religious studies and theology

SVC alumna Elizabeth Elin wins 2024 Clark Award for religious studies and theology

by Public Relations | May 16, 2024

LATROBE, PA — Elizabeth Elin, C’23, won the 2024 Albert Clark Award from Theta Alpha Kappa national honors society for religious studies and theology.

The first Clark Award winner from Saint Vincent College, Elin graduated with degrees in theology and English. The Clark Award, which was first presented in 2002, annually honors the best papers in religious studies and all fields of theology. Theta Alpha Kappa is chartered in more than 350 chapters in educational institutions across the United States.elizabeth-elin.jpg

Elin won the top undergraduate award for a selection from her senior theology thesis, “’In You, O Lord, I Have Hoped’: Disability, Identity, and Dialogic Relationship in Psalm 38." The essay combined Elin’s love of the book of Psalms and her interest in disability studies. She offered a fresh perspective on the intersecting themes of sin, suffering and disability in Psalm 38, one of the penitential psalms, and argued that Psalm 38 offers a positive vision of disability as the locus of the sufferer's encounter with God rather than a punishment for sin.

“Elizabeth's paper demonstrates her ability to read ancient texts closely, harness a wide array of scholarly interlocuters and use contemporary biblical methodologies to draw out fresh meanings from the text,” said Dr. Catherine Petrany, associate professor of theology in the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. “Her academic work stems from a true love of the text. She is a Biblicist at heart.”

Elin lives in Collegeville, MN, where she works as an editor at Liturgical Press, a publishing house affiliated with St. John’s College and St. John’s Abbey. In May 2023, she presented a thesis at the National Undergraduate Literature Conference at Weber State University in Ogden, UT. As a Saint Vincent student, Elin was a recipient of a 2023 A.J. Palumbo Student Research Endowment Fund Award.

 

 

PHOTO: Elizabeth Elin