is a theologian and writer whose work explores the relationship between theology, aesthetics, and the forms through which human beings make sense of themselves and their world. He is a Lecturer in Theology and the Arts at King’s College London. His research ranges across systematic and philosophical theology, architecture, visual art, music, literature, and material culture, united by a particular interest in what happens when theological questions are pursued beyond the conventional boundaries of theological discourse.
Howell’s route into theology was an unconventional one. Before beginning his academic career, he worked in architectural drafting and design and as a professional musician. Architecture cultivated an attention to space, proportion, material, and the relationship between human beings and the environments they construct; music offered another way of thinking about meaning—one dependent upon rhythm, performance, interpretation, and experience rather than explanation alone. Both continue to shape the questions he brings to theology.
He studied philosophy at Trinity International University before completing an MPhil in Modern Theology at the University of Oxford and a PhD in Systematic Theology at the University of St Andrews. His doctoral research focused on the German theologian Eberhard Jüngel and developed into The Theological Aesthetics of Eberhard Jüngel: Beauty in the Absence of God (Mohr Siebeck). That work reflects a continuing concern throughout Howell’s research: how theology speaks about a God who cannot simply be made present as an object of human experience, and what art, language, and beauty might disclose precisely because they resist such possession.
Those questions have increasingly led his work beyond theology’s traditional disciplinary boundaries. Too Sick to Pray: A Theology of Outlaw Country (Fortress Press) turns to the music of Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Townes Van Zandt, and others to consider suffering, grace, failure, and redemption in a musical tradition rarely treated as a source for serious theological reflection. His work on architecture asks a related set of questions about human beings as makers and inhabitants of worlds: what buildings reveal about the people who construct them, how spaces shape those who inhabit them, and whether architecture might itself become a site of theological encounter.
Across these projects, Howell approaches theology not as a closed intellectual system but as a discipline continually brought into contact with the things human beings make. Buildings, paintings, songs, poems, and other cultural objects do more than illustrate ideas already formulated elsewhere. They can generate questions of their own, unsettle established categories, and expose dimensions of human experience that conceptual language struggles to contain. His work therefore moves deliberately between academic theology and the wider worlds of art and culture, asking what each might reveal to the other.