Our Faculty Committee

Dr. Arthur P. Urbano​, JCTE Chair

Dr. Arthur P. Urbano has served as the chair of the Jewish-Catholic Theological Exchange committee since its founding in 2007. He received an M.T.S. in New Testament and Christian Origins at Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Brown University. His primary research area is Early Church Theology and History, including the engagement between Christian, Jews, and pagans in antiquity.

He is currently working on a collaborative oral history project exploring the admission of Jewish students to Providence College and their experiences between 1917 and 1965. He co-teaches interfaith adult education courses with local rabbis at Rhode Island churches and synagogues and  serves as a board member of the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center in Providence.

Dr. Holly Taylor Coolman

Holly Taylor Coolman earned her Ph.D. at Duke University in 2006. Her areas of specialty include Christian accounts of Judaism, as well as the family, especially adoption. Her publications include “Romans 9-11: Rereading Aquinas on the Jews,” in Reading Romans with St Thomas Aquinas, eds. Matthew Levering and Michael Dauphinais. (CUA Press, 2012) and “Law in Translation: Reflecting with Aquinas on the Promulgation of the New Law” in The Challenge of Catholic-Jewish Theological Dialogue, eds., Matthew Tapie & Alan Brill (Forthcoming, CUA Press). 

Dr. Coolman has been on faculty at PC since 2009 and was part of the initial organization of the Committee for Jewish-Catholic Theological Exchange.

Rev. Gabriel Torretta, O.P.

Rev. Gabriel Torretta, O.P., is a church historian whose work focuses on the theology of beauty. He holds masters degrees in pre-modern Japanese literature from Columbia University in New York City, and studied philosophy and theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He earned his doctorate in the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago.

He joined the theology faculty at Providence College as an assistant professor in 2024. His major research interests are Christian ideas of beauty, the history of Christian images and their use in worship, and the material and intellectual culture of the Carolingian era. He is interested in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in the middle ages, especially the Jewish engagement of the ninth-century monastic thinker Hrabanus Maurus.