Carl Raschke

Biography

Carl Raschke was born in New York City and has lived in Texas, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Oklahoma.  A fraternal twin, he grew up in the town of Denison, Texas, which is also the birthplace of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.   He later moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area and graduated from high school in Lafayette, California.   He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California and his Master of Arts from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.   He went on to finish his Ph.D. at Harvard University and began teaching at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado, where he is currently Professor of Religious Studies and past chair of the department. 

During his lifetime, in addition to his high-profile academic career, he has been a journalist, both full-time and part-time, as well as a magazine publishing entrepreneur and consultant/ expert witness working with attorneys and law enforcement agencies on matters involving different kinds of  religious practices.   He has published numerous books, articles, and op-ed essays in major daily newspapers.  He is a well-known expert on religion and higher education, who has been interviewed and quoted on at least 900 different occasions over two decades in numerous local, regional, national, and international media outlets, including all the major US television networks (often on repeat occasions).   During the late 1980s and early 1990s he advised the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC on matters involving core curriculum.  He served for several years as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Core Curriculum.  At present he is a regular contributor to the blogs Church and Pomo and to Rhizone.  

Since 1997 he has been married to his wife Sunny, who grew up in Chicago but moved to Texas in the early Eighties.  Sunny has worked both full-time and part-time for more than 25 years in women's retailing and for the past several years has been immersed in a career as a professional artist, which she studied to be earlier in life.  

Carl has one adult son, Erik, who is a soon-to-be-published novelist residing in Amsterdam, and a grandson named Kes, born in 2006.  He has traveled widely in Europe and at present is developing a major educational project and ministry exchange program with different persons in The Netherlands and in Austria.

He travels back and forth between Colorado and Southern Oklahoma, where he and Sunny own property on one of the largest lakes in the United States.  They have a dog and six cats.