Staff

When Lucas Schulte first heard about Tri-Faith through an NPR story roughly a decade ago while in graduate school in California, he had hoped to become involved. He finally joined the staff of Tri-Faith Initiative in January 2023. His role as Director of Education and Outreach combines expertise in religious pluralism with creative approaches to engagement, emphasizing Religious Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Born and raised on a small family farm near Pleasanton, Nebraska, Luke first became interested in interfaith relations while learning about a Second Vatican Council document on non-Christian religions as part of his Catholic youth group in high school. As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he petitioned for an Individualized Program of Study major in Comparative Religious Studies for his Bachelor of Arts. He then completed a Master of Arts in Religion focusing on Bible at Yale University Divinity School and was awarded the Two Brothers Fellowship for Biblical Studies. Moving from Connecticut to California, Luke then earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Religion at Claremont Graduate University, with particular focus on the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and the ancient Near East. While at Claremont, Luke helped co-found and co-chaired the Religions in Conversation Conference, an annual interfaith conference that ran from 2007 to 2016. During graduate school, he helped edit books and volumes on the Dead Sea Scrolls and also a textbook on Zoroastrianism. He also worked summers as part of international teams of scholars on archaeological excavations in Israel at Ramat Raḥel (near Jerusalem) in 2008 and 2009 and Tell Akko (near Acre) in 2010.
For ten years, Luke taught undergraduate and graduate students as an adjunct professor of religion at a wide range of colleges, universities, and seminaries, such as Pomona College, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Eden Theological Seminary (to name a few).

In 2016, he published as a book through Peeters Publishers a revised and expanded version of his doctoral dissertation on interfaith elements in the biblical book of Nehemiah within the historical, sociological, and religious contexts of the first Persian Empire. More recently Luke has contributed the chapter “Isaiah in the Persian Period” in the recently published book The Cambridge Companion to the Book of Isaiah by Cambridge University Press. After years of part-time contractual teaching assignments as well as full-time positions in the insurance industry, Luke was thrilled to join full-time the kind of inter-faith work for which he had been preparing for the past 20 years.

When not working, Luke enjoys reading fiction (particularly from NPR’s book concierge), riding his bike, cooking until the smoke alarm goes off, helping out on his parents’ farm, playing games and watching Star Trek with his 2 kids, and also traveling and watching K-dramas with his wife, Ligyeom.