Dr. Daniel Allen ’10 realized he wanted to be a college professor while studying to become something else.
“My plan was to go into pastoral ministry,” he explains. “But as part of an M.Div. program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, I taught a Sunday school class for high schoolers on faith and culture. And I realized this is what I want to do with my life.”
He contacted Dr. Kent Olney, a professor he had worked for as a teaching assistant while a student at Olivet Nazarene University. Dr. Olney recommended he pursue graduate work in sociology.
“I knew I wanted to teach, but I didn’t think I would become a researcher,” he says.
That changed during his Ph.D. program at Baylor University. Now as an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Olivet, Dr. Allen equips students to grapple with some of today’s most difficult questions.
“I love it here,” he says. “Every day I get to talk about the things that are important in the world.”
As a missionary kid, Dr. Allen was raised in Germany, where his parents were active with Campus Crusade for Christ. They worked behind the Iron Curtain and in Hungary before returning to the U.S., where Dr. Allen finished high school in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Olivet as a political science and history major with a sociology minor, playing on the basketball team and studying abroad his junior year in Egypt as part of the Middle East Studies Program. Citing the influence of professors like Olney and Dr. David Van Heemst ’96 M.P.C./’98 M.A., Dr. Allen calls his time at Olivet transformational.
“Christian higher education provides a space for reason and faith to speak together,” he explains. “If places like Olivet don’t exist, the Church loses a profound and prophetic voice in culture. The alternative is to either go along with today’s zeitgeist of expressive individualism or become an interest group aligned with a particular sociopolitical agenda.”
At Olivet, Dr. Allen met his wife, Laura (Kirst) ’11, a math education major, member of the volleyball team and student in Olivet’s first Honors Program cohort. After marriage, they lived for two years in Jackson, Mississippi, where Laura worked for Teach for America teaching in the Jackson Public School District. They then spent a year teaching English in South Korea before beginning graduate school, Dr. Allen at Trinity and Laura at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she completed a Master of Public Administration degree. It was while teaching Sunday school at Trinity that Dr. Allen realized studying sociology might be where God was leading him.
“I was passionate about the kinds of questions sociology asks, and I didn’t see a lot of Christians active in that field,” he says. “It seemed like there was a discouraging duality: You could either be a sociologist or a Christian. I wasn’t satisfied by that. I wanted to know: Can I follow the scientific method, follow the facts and still be faithful to the truths of Christianity?”
Part of this, he acknowledges, was his upbringing as a missionary kid.
“I saw from my experiences abroad that the truths of Christianity transcend national and cultural contexts,” he says. “Sociology helps untangle where we mistake cultural realities for the fundamentals of our faith.”
Dr. Allen currently teaches classes in Sociology of the Family, Ethnic Relations, Urban and Rural Sociology, and Research Methods. Laura works part time for the Success Sequence Program, which provides Illinois schools with character-based health curriculum, and together they are raising their three children: Kaya (6), Levi (4) and Avery (2).
Dr. Allen speaks about his hope for his students in terms of equipping.
“At its core, sociology is about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes,” he says. “I want our students to see the spirit in which we do that and be equipped to do it well. I want them to recognize they can face the hardest questions society asks them with the realization that their faith offers something profound to say in response.”
In terms of his own research, he is eager to bring students along in projects applying sociological research and analysis in service of the local community.
“I want to serve the community,” he says. “And I want to help the Olivet community ask questions about itself. I could be happy doing this another 40 years.”
From Olivet The Magazine, Think On These Things – Spring 2025. Read the full issue here.
