Paul Chang-Ha Lim, an intellectual historian with particular focus on the consequences of Christian theology, serves as a Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Lim has previously taught at Vanderbilt University (2006-23) and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (2001-06). Lim has also been a Visiting Professor of Early Modern Religious History at the University of Chicago in Spring 2023, and a Visiting Professor of Religious History at Yonsei University in Summer 2019. He began his teaching journey as a tutorial fellow for the Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge (1999-2001).

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Th.M. from Princeton Seminary, and B.A. in Economics from Yale University.

His Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012), won the 2013 Roland H. Bainton Prize as the best book in history by the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, and has been reviewed by over 20 journals. He has published two other books in that area: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008); and In Pursuit of Purity, Unity, and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Context (Brill, 2004).

He has taught courses on various topics on religion and theology for over 10 years in maximum security prisons in Nashville, Tennessee, along with teaching at Vanderbilt; delivered lectures at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Duke, Beijing, Seoul, Nagoya, Saigon, Jakarta, St Andrews, Oxford, Cambridge, Rotterdam, and Geneva, among others; served for 7 years as Dean of Crawford House, one of the first-year residential colleges at Vanderbilt; has successfully supervised 5 doctoral dissertations and served on 20+ thesis/dissertation committees at Vanderbilt and beyond.

Lim has served the field as the President of the American Society of Church History in 2017, as the Chair of the Prize Committee in Historical Studies for the American Academy of Religion between 2019-21, and as Chair and a member of the Executive Senate of the Faculty Senate for Vanderbilt University between 2013-16.

Future courses he plans to teach include: (1) C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Shape of Christian Apocalyptic Imagination; (2) Baseball, Religion, and Politics in American Narratives; (3) Calvin and Hobbes as Cultural Significations; (4) Religion and A.I.: The Machine Breaks