The Rev. Dr. H. Paul Santmire, activist, teacher, public witness, and pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) since 1965, almost rejected the Lutheran Church altogether when he was an undergraduate at Harvard College during the 1950s. Raised in Lutheran congregations of German heritage, he had, for reasons that later troubled him deeply, never learned about the complicity of many German Lutherans, including some theologians, in the political forces that enabled the Nazis to implement their policies of Jewish extermination, called the Holocaust.
Improbably perhaps, Santmire first learned about the Holocaust when he was 19, long after World War II had ended. This, in a German history course that he took as a college sophomore. He was immediately thrust into a crisis of faith. How could so many “good Lutherans” – the Church tradition that had shaped his own life so deeply – be so complicit in the rise and the rule of Adolf Hitler!?
In due course, Santmire spoke about his faith-crisis with the then pastor of University Lutheran Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Rev. Dr. Henry E. Horn. After listening for some time, Horn talked with this then deeply troubled college sophomore about the German Lutheran theologian, resister, and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived during pre-Nazi and Nazi times in Germany.
That conversation saved Santmire’s life in the Lutheran Church and made it possible for him, along the way, to develop his own ecumenical vision. He subsequently went on to write his undergraduate honors thesis on the German resistance to Hitler, focusing on leading figures such as Bonhoeffer. Later, upon receiving his doctorate in historical and systematic theology from Harvard Divinity School, Santmire accepted a call to become Lutheran Chaplain at Harvard, as Horn’s assistant at University Lutheran Church.
In 1968, Santmire moved to Wellesley College to become that institution’s first Chaplain, with the understanding that he would shape his ministry ecumenically. He immediately found himself thrust into the turbulent era of the nineteen-sixties. He was sought out by student activists such as Hillary Rodham – later Clinton – who saluted him in her now famous graduation speech and who subsequently remembered their partnership fondly in her book What Happened.
It was during those years that Santmire published his first book, widely regarded as a pioneering work in ecological theology, Brother Earth: Nature, God, and Ecology in a Time of Crisis (1970). At that time, Santmire also served as one of the two theological writers, along with the eminent Chicago theologian, Joseph Sittler, of the 1973 Lutheran Church in America social teaching guide, “The Human Crisis in Ecology.”
By 1980, Santmire had concluded that the time had come for him to move on from his academic ministry in order “to get into the trenches,” as he said when he left Wellesley College. So he accepted a call in 1980 to serve as the Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford was then the fourth poorest city in the US, and that congregation was situated in one of Hartford’s poverty neighborhoods. Before too long, working with an ecumenical coalition of neighborhood churches, Santmire became what some neighborhood people called “the Godfather” of a community organizing project, inspired by the methods of Saul Alinsky, a project then led by Black women who lived in Grace Church’s poverty neighborhood, many of them on welfare.
Santmire also found a way at that time to take a month’s leave to join a Lutheran Church in America (LCA) biracial delegation sent to visit indigenous Lutheran congregations in Southern Africa, at the height of the apartheid crisis. The delegation met with ecumenical leaders in that region, too, such as the then Anglican Bishop, Desmond Tutu. (Santmire at that time smuggled with him an illegal, secret written communique to Tutu from the latter’s daughter, who was then living in Massachusetts.) From that experience came Santmire’s short book South African Testament: From Personal Encounter to Theological Challenge (1987).
Back in Hartford, Santmire invested many of his pastoral energies in what he thought of at the time as “liturgical renewal,” inspired by an ecumenical movement that had been championed by his early mentor in the ministry, the Rev. Dr. Henry E. Horn. Notwithstanding the many demands of his inner city ministry, too, Santmire kept writing. At that time, he produced a history of Christian thinking about nature, The Travail of Nature: the Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (1985), which Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner later called “a little classic,” and a study of liturgy and ecology, Ritualizing Nature: A Christian Spirituality (1989).
That interest in liturgy and spirituality led him to accept a call as the Senior Pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church, Akron, Ohio in 1994. A large, regional Church based in the city’s downtown, where the eminent President of the Lutheran Church in America, Franklin Clark Fry, had once been pastor, Trinity was blessed with one of the largest pipe organs in the Midwest and with a strong music ministry. In that setting, Santmire brought his longstanding interests in liturgy and spirituality to bear on that congregation’s worship and on its engagement with its own community, interests that were later reflected in his book, Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality (2014).
It was during that time in Akron that he also produced what is perhaps his most comprehensive albeit concise theological study, comprised of ecumenical reflections on ecology, justice, liturgy, and spirituality, Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology (2000). That short book sketches the fundamentals of Santmire’s theology of ecojustice: a cosmic vision predicated on the witness of the People of God, as announced by the Christian Scriptures.
Santmire retired in 2000, but not from his longstanding theological and activist interests. He subsequently produced the aforementioned book, Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality (2014) and also Behold the Lilies: Jesus and the Contemplation of Nature (2017), Celebrating Nature by Faith: Studies in Reformation Theology in an Era of Global Emergency (2020), and, most recently, EcoActivist Testament: Faith Explorations for Fellow Travelers (2022). He also began writing online essays, his personal blogs commenting on a wide variety of social, aesthetic, environmental, and theological themes.
Of Santmire’s theological contributions, John F. Hoffmeyer, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, United Lutheran Seminary, said in 2020: “No theologian alive in the United States has contributed more to a Christian understanding of nature…”
After he retired, Santmire and his wife of more than fifty years, Laurel, moved from Akron back to the Boston area in 2001. The Santmires, who met at UniLu, Cambridge during the nineteen sixties and were married there by Pastor Henry Horn, then became members, again, of that very congregation.
Also since his retirement at the turn of the century, Santmire, along with the ELCA New Testament scholar, David Rhoads, has played a prominent role in supporting the ministries of Lutherans Restoring Creation, a lay-led grassroots movement in the ELCA that champions Green Synods and Green Congregations, and works to support ecoactivists in Lutheran circles throughout the U.S.
For more than forty years the Santmire and his wife have also cared for the land around their old, rural farmhouse in southwestern Maine, in the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. This land has figured prominently in many of Santmire’s writings. In one essay, exploring Celtic spirituality, he describes the “Hidden Garden” that he and Laurel created, and which they have long cared for, as the place where they hope their ashes will finally rest. For Santmire, “ecumenical” has long meant not just the whole Christian Church throughout the ages, ministering to all, especially the poor and the oppressed, but also the whole Earth and, indeed, the entire Cosmos, as he thinks of it: as groaning in travail.
Paul Santmire was born in Buffalo, New York, November 28, 1935, the son of Harold Clinton Santmire, a dentist, and Elsajean Claire Santmire, an artist who worked with clay and who sometimes painted. His sister, Mary Kay (Santmire) Nashe, was a dietician, and his brother, Gary Clinton Santmire, was an ordained Lutheran pastor. His wife, Laurel Annette (Oliver) Santmire, was a computer programmer and is a gifted flutist. His daughter, Heather Annette (Santmire) Denkmire is a professional fundraiser and computer specialist in Portland, Maine. His son, Matthew Paul Santmire, is a public school teacher in Wayland, Massachusetts. Dr. Santmire and his wife have five grandchildren.
*Originally prepared to make available to reporters who had asked for interviews; and subsequently revised, most recently October 22, 2025.