Joel Aguilar, PhD

Joel D. Aguilar Ramírez is a Christian theologian, educator, and practitioner scholar whose work sits at the intersection of mimetic theory, Christian ethics, and practical theology. His research examines how communities of faith form moral agency, solidarity, and peacemaking practices across lines of difference, with particular attention to contexts shaped by poverty, violence, and social fragmentation in the Global South and urban margins.

He is the author of A Human Catechism: A Journey from Collective Woundedness and Violence into Peacemaking (Wipf and Stock, 2024). His most recent contribution, “A Guatemalan Experience of Planetary Urbanization,” appears in Urban Gems: Ministry Perspectives on the Global City and Its People, edited by Joel Kiekintveld (2026).

Joel holds a PhD in Practical Theology from the University of Pretoria and has taught graduate courses in Christian systematic theology, Christian ethics, liberation theology, missiology, and transformational leadership at institutions across North America and Latin America. He is committed to rigorous theological inquiry, hospitable classroom dialogue, and mentoring students for lives of leadership and service.