L. L. Schulte

Lucas L. Schulte, Ph.D. is a religion scholar specializing in Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and the ancient Near East. He serves as the Director of Education and Outreach at the Tri-Faith Initiative in Omaha, Nebraska. Born and raised on a small family farm near Pleasanton, Nebraska, Luke first became interested in interfaith relations while learning about a Second Vatican Council document on non-Christian religions as part of his Catholic youth group in high school. He completed a B.A. with Honors in Comparative Religious Studies (Individualized Program of Study) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a Master of Arts in Religion in Bible from Yale University Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in Religion from Claremont Graduate University. While at Claremont, he helped co-found and co-chaired the Religions in Conversation Conference, an annual interfaith conference that ran from 2007 to 2016. During graduate school, he helped edit a book and a volume on the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as a textbook on Zoroastrianism. He also gained archaeological field experience from excavating for three seasons in Israel: two at Ramat Raḥel (between Jerusalem and Bethlehem), and one at Tel Akko (near Acre). His first authored book, My Shepherd, though You Do not Know Me: The Persian Royal Propaganda Model in the Nehemiah Memoir (2016), is a revised and expanded version of his doctoral dissertation on interfaith elements in the biblical book of Nehemiah within the historical, sociological, and religious contexts of the first Persian Empire. More recently he wrote the chapter “Isaiah in the Persian Period” in the book The Cambridge Companion to the Book of Isaiah (2024).

For over ten years, Dr. Schulte taught undergraduate and graduate students as an adjunct professor of religion at a wide range of colleges, universities, and seminaries, such as Pomona College, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Claremont School of Theology, California Lutheran University, and Eden Theological Seminary (to name a few). In 2022, he was thrilled to join the non-profit organization known as the Tri-Faith Initiative in order to engage full-time in the kind of interfaith work for which he had been preparing for the past 20 years.