Dale Soden
Professor of History
Director of the Weyerhaeuser Center for Christian Faith and Learning
300 W. Hawthorne Road
Spokane, WA 99251
Phone: (509) 777-4433
Fax: (509) 777-3711
dsoden@whitworth.edu

Office Location: Weyerhaeuser Hall Suite 210D

Education: Ph.D., University of Washington (1980).

Born in Spokane and raised in the Seattle area, Dale Soden received his undergraduate degree from Pacific Lutheran University. He came to Whitworth in 1985 after teaching at his alma mater as well as at Oklahoma Baptist University. Specializing in American intellectual history and American religious history, Soden has taught a variety of courses from American Popular Culture to the War in Vietnam. In 1990, he received the Whitworth Sears Award for creative teaching and campus leadership. He is also the director of the Weyerhaeuser Center for Christian Faith and Learning as well as the director of the university's strategic-planning efforts. During the last few years, he has worked with students on both video and audio documentaries.

Soden's writing has focused primarily on topics related to religious influence on public life in the Pacific Northwest. In 1990, he wrote A Venture of Mind and Spirit: An Illustrated History of Whitworth University, and therefore serves as the university historian. In 2001, the University of Washington Press published his latest book, The Reverend Mark Matthews: Activist in the Progressive Era. His most recent research has focused on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in the Pacific Northwest and is included as a chapter in the book Gender and the Social Gospel, published by the University of Illinois Press, as well as in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly. In 2004, his chapter on the role of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in shaping public policy in Washington and Oregon was published by Roman and Littlefield in the book Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone.

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