Sonya S. Cronin

Sonya S. Cronin, Ph.D., is a scholar of the New Testament and a public theologian whose work moves between the ancient text and the contemporary prison. She teaches in the Department of Religion at Florida State University, where she earned her doctorate, and leads courses for FSU's International Programs in London and Florence. She is the author of The Repentance of YHWH: Mark's Gospel of Universal Inclusion (Fortress Press, 2025) and Raymond Brown, the Jews, and the Gospel of John: From Apologia to Apology (T&T Clark, 2015), a study of how Christian reading of the Fourth Gospel was reshaped in the long aftermath of the Holocaust. Across essays on Jewish-Christian dialogue, the foreign women of Ezra-Nehemiah, and the moral pull of fantasy literature. Her scholarship returns again and again to a single question: who belongs inside the circle of divine mercy, and who has been left outside it. Cronin is the founder and executive director of The Carrier Pigeon Post, a nonprofit that delivers a free monthly newspaper of story, essay, and poetry into more than 180 prisons and reentry facilities, reaching tens of thousands of incarcerated readers each month. She is also the co-founder and past board chair of Joseph House, a home of welcome for men returning from prison. In classroom, on the page, and behind bars, her conviction is the same: that no one is beyond the reach of a story, or of hope.