Hee Jin Lee

Assistant Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy

Methodist Theological University, BA, MDiv; Claremont School of Theology, MA; Candler School of Theology, Emory University, ThD

Hee Jin Lee, ThD, is a pastoral theologian, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Georgia, and a provisional elder in the Missouri Conference of the United Methodist Church. Lee majored in the philosophy of religion and earned a MDiv degree with an emphasis on different understandings of violence and sin from Methodist Theological University in Seoul, South Korea. For her MA in spiritual care and counseling, she concentrated on human suffering and intrapsychic as well as interpersonal issues stemming from structural violence. She continued this work for her ThD in pastoral care and counseling from Candler School of Theology at Emory University.

Previously, Lee taught the introduction to spiritual and pastoral care course at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities as an adjunct professor and served as the lead pastor for three United Methodist congregations in rural areas of Missouri. She also completed a clinical pastoral education internship and a residency in two different hospitals and received advanced counseling training in various states. Her diverse clinical and pastoral experiences encompass work in church, community NGO, university, and counseling center settings across South Korea and the United States.

Lee has sought to integrate clinical and pastoral experiences with academic concerns. Her research interests include collective and intersectional trauma, intercultural spiritual/pastoral care and counseling in postcolonial and global contexts, pastoral/practical theology, psychotherapy, and narrative and family therapy. Lee’s forthcoming article, to be published in the Journal of Pastoral Theology, is titled “A Decolonizing Care Approach for Those Experiencing the Intergenerational and Transnational Transmission of Historical Trauma,” and her current book project is Survival Spirituality: Transmission of Trauma in Narratives of Korean Descendants, which is under contract with Pickwick Publications.

I am thrilled to join Louisville Seminary, where we, as a community, are committed to cultivating care, healing, and justice for people and contexts around the world through interdisciplinary approaches that examine multilayered systemic, intercultural, and intrapersonal relationships.
—Hee Jin Lee