Samuel Wells was born in Canada, studied in Oxford, Edinburgh, and Durham, UK and spent fourteen years in parish ministry in the Church of England, mostly in socially deprived areas, before moving to North Carolina to be Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School. He has written several books in the field of theological ethics, including Transforming Fate into Destiny: The Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (2004), Improvisation and the Drama of Christian Ethics (2004) and Community-Led Estate Regeneration and the Local Church (2003). He co-edited with Stanley Hauerwas The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Blackwell, 2004).