Ralph C. Wood is Emeritus University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he taught from 1998-2021. He holds the B.A. and M.A. from East Texas State College (now Texas A&M University-Commerce) as well as the A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. From 1971-1997 he taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he served as the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion from 1990. At Baylor, he taught in the Great Texts program (Honors College) as well as the departments of Religion and English. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1982-83) served as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame (2007-2008). He also taught at Samford University in Birmingham, Regent College in Vancouver, and Providence College in Rhode Island, where he occupied the Reverend Robert J. Randall Distinguished Chair of Christian Culture in 2010-11.
In addition to serving as an editor-at-large for the Christian Century for more than 30 years, he remains on the editorial boards of the Flannery O’Connor Review as well as Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. All of his books remain available: The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists [Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike and Peter De Vries] (Notre Dame, 1988); Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (Baylor, 2003); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster/John Knox, 2004); Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004), Literature and Theology (Abingdon, 2008), Preaching and Professing: Sermons by a Teacher Seeking to Proclaim the Gospel (Eerdmans, 2009); Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God (Baylor, 2011);Tolkien Among the Moderns (2015); as well as Flannery O’Connor and the Church Visible: A Revoutionary Witness for the Sake of the Gospel (2024).