J. Bradley Wigger

Second Presbyterian Church Professor of Christian Education

Southeast Missouri State University, BS; Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, MDiv; Princeton Theological Seminary, PhD

J. Bradley Wigger, a minister ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), has served churches in Colorado, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Mexico. He has also been a social worker in a school of special education, and he taught at Princeton Theological Seminary and Marian College of Fond du Lac, Wisc., before joining the faculty at Louisville Seminary in 1997. In addition to teaching, during his first decade at LPTS, Wigger directed the Seminary’s Center for Congregations and Family Ministries. As Center Director, he edited the journal Family Ministry, co-edited the Families and Faith Book Series (Jossey-Bass), provided leadership educational opportunities through conferences and workshops, and taught and continues to teach courses focused upon children and families, child advocacy, practical theology, writing, and the church’s teaching ministry.

Wigger has authored several articles and books. His most recent publication is Invisible Companions: Encounters with Imaginary Friends, Gods, Ancestors, and Angels (Stanford, 2019), based upon over 500 interviews with children across the globe. He has also written for children, including the picture book, Thank You, God (Eerdmans, 2014), as well as for parents: Together We Pray: A Prayer Book for Families (Chalice, 2005), and The Power of God at Home: Nurturing Our Children in Love and Grace (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Wigger has written two books focused upon the intersection of religion, science, and knowing: Original Knowing: How Religion, Science, and the Human Mind Point to the Irreducible Depth of Life (Cascade, 2012), and The Texture of Mystery (Bucknell University Press, 1998). In 2018, he began conducting research into children's religious imaginations as a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology, interviewing children and their parents about their faith beliefs and practices, research currently funded by the Parenting and Caregiving grant to the seminary from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.

Homes and congregations are crucial to the Church’s teaching ministry; they are realms that potentially form and transform our ideas about life, our patterns of relationship, notions of who we are, our sense of vocation and purpose, as well as our understandings of love and justice.
—J. Bradley Wigger