Iliff School of Theology is pleased to welcome two new faculty members to our team: Rev. Candice NunnTelfort and George Schmidt. Both will start on June 1, 2026.
Rev. Candice NunnTelfort
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Culture, and Spiritual Care
Candice NunnTelfort (they/them) is a doctoral candidate at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Pastoral Theology, Personality, and Culture -Clinical Track. They have completed the Advanced Certificate in Self Psychology and Religion at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago. Their academic formation includes study at Lincoln University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU), and Vanderbilt Divinity School, spanning religion, psychology, and culture and grounding an interdisciplinary approach to clinical and theological inquiry.
Candice is a Lacanian psychoanalyst in formation and a founding clinician of the Openings Project, a clinic for psychosis and extreme states at Depth Counseling in Chicago, Illinois. They currently serve as Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center of Psychoanalysis and as a Teaching Fellow at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Candice also serves on several community and nonprofit boards, including Chicago’s 606 Project and the U.S. Chapter of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS-US), where they work to address gaps in care for individuals experiencing psychosis and other extreme states.
Ordained in the Baptist tradition, Candice’s work integrates clinical practice, theological reflection, and community-based engagement. Their dissertation, The Black Psychotic: Blackness, Psychosis, and Psychoanalysis, investigates the relationship between Blackness and psychosis within the social link.
George Schmidt
George Schmidt is the husband of Rev. Larissa Romero and the father of Frida and Colwyn Romero-Schmidt. He was born in southern Indiana along the banks of the Ohio River, and he brings over a decade of chaplaincy experience with him to Iliff, having operated in military, prison, and hospital contexts.
Before Iliff, he was the Senior Teaching Fellow with Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Doctor of Ministry Program in Integrative Chaplaincy and the Graduate Research Fellow with the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. He currently serves as a Lieutenant Commander and supervisory chaplain in the Navy Chaplain Corps, where he operates with the III Marine Expeditionary Force out of Okinawa.
His scholarship is not only grounded in his work as a chaplain but also in his many years in community organizing. He has worked on campaigns ranging from housing justice and prison abolition to struggles for labor rights that build economic democracy while undoing racial capitalism. His current work seeks to amplify spiritual care’s capacity to, in the words of Adorno, “allow suffering to speak” for the purposes of liberative social practices, turning private grief into public witness. This essentially links the core competencies of chaplaincy with the commitments of liberation theology, which he is calling emancipatory chaplaincy.
George completed his MDiv at Union Theological Seminary under the advisement of Dr. James Cone, and he is currently finishing his PhD at Vanderbilt University under the direction of Dr. Joerg Rieger.
