Mark Randall James

Mark James is a theologian and a scholar of scriptural interpretation, husband to Christina and father to Ephrem and Geneva. He graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary and was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal diocese of Washington in July 2025. He's also the former Children’s Minister at Christ Church + Washington Parish in Washington, DC. His scholarship focuses on how classical Christian and Jewish Biblical interpreters approached reading as an occasion for forming wisdom. His book on Origen’s hermeneutics shows how his bold and imaginative exegesis is integral to the process of acquiring wisdom by learning to speak the language of scripture. He edited a collection of essays about his teacher, the philosopher Peter Ochs, which includes his introduction (with Randi Rashkover) arguing that Ochs’s pragmatism is a contemporary renewal of the classical Jewish wisdom tradition. He also edits the Journal of Textual Reasoning, a journal of Jewish philosophy. He practices and trains others in Scriptural Reasoning, a method of inter-faith scripture study.