El Centro College Arts and Sciences Division

Mark G. Thames has been with El Centro College since 2004 as an adjunct instructor and since 2006 full-time. He teaches courses in philosophy, ethics, and world religions. He also coordinates the College program in these disciplines, and is faculty sponsor of the Socratic Cafe student organization.

As for qualifications to teach, in 2004 Mark completed a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas from the University of Texas at Dallas. His specialization is European social and political philosophy since 1800, and his dissertation concerns political and religious approaches to the globalization of ideas, cultures, and worldviews. He also has competencies in philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion. In addition, Mark received an M.Div. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1989, concentrating in world religions and Christian missions, and a B.A. in management science from Duke University in 1982. He has presented papers at several conferences, published an article on the political philosophy of the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard in 2007, and compiled a reader for courses in introduction to philosophy, also in 2007. His ongoing research interests concern the proper understanding of and response to the great diversity of basic beliefs and values in our country and our world.

Mark was born in Oklahoma and raised in Denton, Texas, by a University of North Texas political science professor and a Missouri mom. He graduated from Denton High School in 1978, with bad hair and appalling taste in pants and shirts.

Mark is married, since 1983, to Dawn E. Thames, R.N.C. (a 1997 El Centro nursing program grad!). They have two children: Jonnathan, a senior in Southeast Asian studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Elizabeth, a senior at the School for the Talented and Gifted at Townview Center in Dallas.

Prior to coming to El Centro, Mark worked many jobs, from manual laborer in a tobacco warehouse to roofer to bookkeeper. He discoed while cataloguing Latin publications in a library in North Carolina, wintered the Reagan years as a historic preservationist in Kentucky, and taught African history to Africans while he and his family lived in Lusaka, Zambia, in the early 1990s. Most recently, Dawn and Mark helped start Lower Greenville Baptist Community, an urban alternative church in Dallas.

Mark and his family live in the Peaks Addition Historic District in old east Dallas. He is active in a number of community and professional organizations, goes whenever possible to White Rock Lake and the Arboretum, and gardens. Being an old Eagle Scout, his chief recreation away from home is backpacking, hiking, and camping with Dawn.