The Empirical Humanist

Kirk E. Low­ery (MDiv, Tal­bot Grad­u­ate School of The­ol­ogy; MA, PhD Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les) is Pres­i­dent and Senior Research Fel­low of the J. Alan Groves Cen­ter for Advanced Bib­li­cal Research. He is also Adjunct Pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment at West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary teach­ing doc­toral sem­i­nars in Advanced Hebrew Syn­tax, Text Lin­guis­tics of Bib­li­cal Hebrew and ancient near east­ern lan­guages such as Ara­maic and Ugaritic.  His research inter­ests include the inter­sec­tion of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy with bib­li­cal stud­ies, as well as gen­eral and com­pu­ta­tional linguistics.

The Groves Cen­ter pro­duces the West­min­ster Hebrew Mor­phol­ogy, used by most Bible soft­ware that offer access to the orig­i­nal text. He is also a for­mer Chair of the Com­puter Assisted Research Group (CARG) of the Soci­ety of Bib­li­cal Lit­er­a­ture, and is one of the mod­er­a­tors of the B-​​Hebrew Inter­net dis­cus­sion forum.

Kirk Lowery’s aca­d­e­mic career began in the late 1970s cor­rect­ing hard­copy print­out of a Syr­iac chrestomathy stored on punch­cards. His grad­u­ate work at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les (M.A., Ph.D.) included proof­read­ing of the book of Judges for the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan (Ann Arbor) effort to cre­ate the elec­tronic ver­sion of Bib­lia Hebraica Stut­targten­sia under the direc­tion of H. Van Parunak. His dis­ser­ta­tion, Toward a Dis­course Gram­mar of Bib­li­cal Hebrew, includes the first pub­lished algo­rithm for the deter­mi­na­tion of clause bound­aries in Hebrew and raised the ques­tion of the ade­quacy of tra­di­tional Hebrew gram­mat­i­cal cat­e­gories and notions in a com­pu­ta­tional world. It was also among the first to be printed at UCLA by a room-​​sized laser printer, using bitmaps of Hebrew char­ac­ters cre­ated in con­sul­ta­tion with the Depart­ment of Com­puter Science.

Dr. Low­ery taught and lived in East­ern Europe for fif­teen years, includ­ing eight years as Pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment for the Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary in Budapest. He is flu­ent in Ger­man and Hun­gar­ian. In 1998 he joined the staff of West­min­ster The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary as Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the West­min­ster Hebrew Insti­tute work­ing together with Prof. Alan Groves. In 2002 he assumed respon­si­bil­i­ties as Direc­tor of the Insti­tute until the Groves Cen­ter was incor­po­rated as an inde­pen­dent non-​​profit cor­po­ra­tion in 2009.

Dr. Low­ery is mar­ried to Jean, and they have one son, Kevin, who is pur­su­ing a mas­ters degree (music per­for­mance, vio­lon­cello) at Tem­ple Uni­ver­sity, Philadel­phia, PA. Dr. Lowery’s per­sonal inter­ests include the active study of the oboe and he is a licensed Ama­teur Radio oper­a­tor (call sign: KB3TLA).