Miguel A. De La Torre (born October 6, 1958) is a full professor of social ethics at Iliff School of Theology, a religious scholar, author, and an ordained minister.
Born in Cuba months before the Castro Revolution, De La Torre and his family migrated to the United States as refugees when he was an infant. For a while the U.S. government considered him and his family as “illegal aliens”. He attended Blessed Sacrament School in Queens, New York and was baptized and confirmed by the Catholic Church. Simultaneously, his parents were priest/priestess of the religion Santerķa. He left Queens, moving to Miami, Florida in his teens.
At nineteen years of age he began a real estate company in Miami called Championship Realty, Century 21. The office grew to over 100 sales agents. During this time he obtained a Masters in Public Administration from American University in Washington, DC. Eventually he was elected president of the Miami Board of Realtors. He was also active in local politics, becoming the founding president of the West Dade Young Republicans. In 1988 he was a candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, District 115, but lost to Mario Diaz-Balart.
In his early twenties he became a “born-again” Christian, joining University Baptist Church in Coral Gables, Florida. De La Torre dissolved the thirteen-year-old real estate company in 1992 to attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in order to obtain a Masters in Divinity and enter the ministry. During his seminary training he served as pastor at a rural congregation, Goshen Baptist Church in Glen Dean, Kentucky.
De La Torre continued his theological training and obtained a doctorate from Temple University in social ethics in 1999. According to the books he published, he focuses on ethics within contemporary U.S. thought, specifically how religion affects race, class, and gender oppression. His works 1) applies a social scientific approach to Latino/a religiosity within this country; 2) studies Liberation theologies in the Caribbean and Latin America (specifically in Cuba); and 3) engages in postmodern/postcolonial social theory.
In 1999 he was hired to teach Christian Ethics at Hope College in Holland, MI. In 2005 he wrote a column for the local newspaper, The Holland Sentinel, titled “When the Bible is Used for Hatred.” The article was a satirical piece commenting on Focus on the Family’s James Dobson outing of SpongeBob Square Pants. Dobson responded to the article.
A controversy over these articles ensued. A few months afterwards, De La Torre resigned his tenure and took the position of associate professor for social ethics at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.
Since obtaining his doctorate in 1999, De La Torre has authored numerous articles and books, including several books that have won national awards, specifically: Reading the Bible from the Margins, (Orbis, 2002); Santerķa: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004); and Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins, (Orbis, 2004). Within the academy he has served as a director to the Society of Christian Ethics and the American Academy of Religion. Additionally, he has been co-chair of the Ethics Section at the American Academy of Religion.
De La Torre has been an expert commentator concerning ethical issues (mainly Hispanic religiosity, LGBT civil rights, and immigration rights) on several local, national, and international media outlets. He also writes monthly articles for Ethics Daily which create controversies within Christian circles.
