Contributions: Shola Adegbite
Shola Adegbite is a PhD candidate at Union Theological Seminary, NY. She engages the Bible using storytelling as well as her Yoruba-African background and socio-historical and ideology criticisms. She also has interests in gender, embodied, and earth-centered approaches with a goal of liberation, justice, healing, and diversity. She is a teaching fellow for introductory level classes on the Bible, New Testament, and church history.
Contributions: Desmond D. Coleman
Desmond D. Coleman is a humanities teaching fellow in philosophy at Alvernia University. His current interests lie at the intersections of critical philosophy of race, Black critical philosophy of film, and the uses of alchemy within Western histories of science, art, theology, and philosophy. Heâs currently in the process of rewriting his dissertation, for which he received a Ford Foundation Fellowship award, into a book (provisionally titled: âRuminations on Alchemy and Blacknessâ).
Contributions: Salim Faraji
Salim Faraji is a professor and former chair of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is also the founding executive director of the Master of Arts in International Studies (MAIS) Africa Program at Concordia University Irvine in Ghana, West Africa. He is a member of the International Society for Nubian Studies and a founding member of the William Leo Hansberry Society. He specializes in early Christian history, Africana and Africanist historiography, Coptic studies, and the Kerma, Napatan, Meroitic and Medieval periods of Nubian history. Professor Faraji is a contributor to Albert Cleage Jr. and the Black Madonna Child, the Encyclopedia of African Religion, the Oxford Dictionary of African Biography, and more recently, Origins and Afterlives of Kush: Proceedings of the University of California at Santa Barbara Conference in Nubian Studies, July 25â 27 2019. He is the author of The Roots of Nubian Christianity Uncovered: The Triumph of the Last Pharaoh. Professor Faraji is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a practicing African Traditional Priest who has been initiated in both the Akan traditions of Ghana, West Africa, and ancient Egyptian and Nubian religious practice. He is an adjunct faculty member of the University of La Verneâs Ecumenical Center for Black Church Studies, Payne Theological Seminary, and is currently president of the Amen-Ra Community Assembly of California-Amen Ra Theological Seminary.
Contributions: Rachel E. Harding
Rachel Elizabeth Harding is a poet, historian, and scholar of religions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Harding teaches in the Ethnic Studies department of the University of Colorado Denver and writes about religion, creativity, and social justice in the experience of communities of African descent in the U.S. and Brazil. Dr. Harding is author of two books: A Refuge in Thunder, a history of the Afro-Brazilian religion, CandomblĂ©; and more recently, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism and Mothering, co-written with her mother, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, on the role of compassion and mysticism in African American social justice organizing. Dr. Harding is also an ebĂŽmi (ritual elder) in the Terreiro do Cobre CandomblĂ© community in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. She co directs the Veterans of Hope Projectâan interdisciplinary initiative on religion, grassroots democracy, and healing, that was founded by her parents, Vincent and Rosemarie Freeney Harding. (www.veteransof hope.org).
Afterword: Catherine Keller
Catherine Keller is the George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in the Theological School and Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University. She practices theology as a relation between ancient hints of ultimacy and current matters of urgency. She is the author of numerous books, including most recently Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances.
Contributions: Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo
Minenhle Nomalungelo Khumalo is a South African biblical scholar who focuses on reading sacred texts with understandings of popular cultural production of narrative. Her work makes use of ancestral, sociocultural, and academic practices toward constructing pedagogies for collective psychosocial resistance.
Contributions: Althea Spencer Miller
Althea Spencer Miller is an assistant professor of New Testament, Drew Theological School. Spencer Millerâs recent research and work in progress under the heading âReading with Island Eyes, Speaking in Island Tongues: A Postcolonial, Autoethnographic Approach to Oralityâ focuses on the development of an oral hermeneutic for decolonizing biblical interpretation. This research includes a teaching interest in Africana studies and religion and the development of oral and Africana pedagogies. Spencer Miller is co-editor of Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives with Kathleen OâBrien Wicker and Musa Dube (2005) and has contributed essays as chapters in many publications since then. One essay that introduces her thinking on orality as a cultural phenomenon is âCreolizing Hermeneutics: A Caribbean Invitation,â in Islands, Islanders, and the Bible: Ruminations (2015).
Contributions: Pamela Mordecai
Pamela Mordecai writes poetry, plays, and long and short fiction. Born and raised in Jamaica, she and her family immigrated to Canada in 1994. A former teacher and teacher-trainer with a PhD in English, Mordecai has authored and co-authored numerous textbooks and edited and co-edited groundbreaking anthologies, especially of Caribbean womenâs writing. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Romanian, and Serbian. With her late husband, Martin, she wrote a reference work, Culture and Customs of Jamaica. She has published a novel, a short story collection, five childrenâs books, and nine poetry collections, the latest of which are de book of Joseph, which completes her New Testament trilogy in Jamaican patwa, and A Fierce Green Place: New and Collected Poems. Her poetry is archived at https://mordecai.citl.mun.ca/.
Edited: Kenneth N. Ngwa
Kenneth Ngwa is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew Theological School. Ngwaâs current research interests are in the fields of African/a biblical hermeneutics. He is also the founder and director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew Theological School, an interdisciplinary forum that examines the relation between religion and health, healthy disparities, and collaborative work for health equity. Ngwa is the author of The Hermeneutics of the âHappyâ Ending in Job 42:7â17 (2005); co-editor of Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from Our Pots and Calabashes (2018); and Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus (2022).
Edited: Aliou Cissé Niang
Aliou CissĂ© Niang is an associate professor of biblical interpretationâNew Testamentâat Union Theological Seminary in New York. Niang is the author of Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal (2009); co-author of Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World (2012); A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude (Cascade Books, 2019); âCatholic Epistles,â in Anselm Companion to the New Testament (Anselm Academic, 2014); âSpace and Human Agency in the Making of the Story of Gershom through a Senegalese Christian Lens,â Forum-Journal of Biblical Literature (2015); âIslandedness, Translation, and Creolization,â in Islands, Islanders, and Bible: RumInations (2015); âChristianity in Senegal,â and âDiola Religion,â both in Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South, ed. Mark A. Lamport and Philip Jenkins (2018).
Contributions: Hugh R. Page Jr.
(The Rev. Canon) Hugh R. Page is a professor of theology and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame, where he also serves as vice president for Institutional Transformation and advisor to the president. He is author, editor, or co-editor of several books, including most recently: Israelâs Poetry of Resistance: Africana Perspectives on Early Hebrew Verse (2013âas author), The Fortress Commentary on the Old Testament (2014âas co-editor), and Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: âThere Is a Mysteryâ (201âas co-editor).
Edited: Arthur Pressley
Arthur Pressley is an associate professor of psychology and religion at Drew University, where he has also served as academic dean. Pressley is also a clinical psychologist, a past president of the New Jersey Association of Black Psychologists and has worked on numerous international issues, most notably the Childhood Chernobyl Childhood Illness Project. He currently teaches a course titled âFanon and Psychoanalysis of Black Novels.â Some of his published articles include âUsing Novels of Resistance to Teach Intercultural Analysis and Empathyâ; âTeaching Black: God Talk and Black Thinkers,â in Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies, ed. Nancy Lynne Westfield (2007), and âThe Story of Nimrod: A Struggle with Otherness and the Search for Identity,â in African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod, ed. Anthony Pinn and Allen Dwight Callahan (2008).
Contributions: A. Paige Rawson
A. Paige Rawson is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner, who spent almost a decade in the ministry before obtaining a PhD in order to study and teach the Bible and theology through feminist, queer, and poststructuralist lenses. Paigeâs work eschews traditional Western European individualism and its methodologies, and is animated by their commitment to social justice, antiracist epistemological activism, and embodied cognition. Having recently made an exodus out of academia into coaching and consulting, Paige is now happier and more fulfilled than ever.
Contributions: Nimi Wariboko
Nimi Wariboko is the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University. He is one of the most original and provocative economic ethicists, theological theorists, and philosophers in the world today. His original, transdisciplinary oeuvre combines social sciences, philosophy, radical theology, literary, and cultural studies to create new ideas and theories, disrupt conventional wisdom, and promote human flourishing. He is the author of twenty-four monographs, co-editor of six volumes, and multiple journal articles, book reviews, and book chapters. The six pillars of his scholarship are economic ethics, Christian social ethics, African social traditions/political theology, Pentecostal studies, philosophical theology, and literary studies. In 2020 a group of scholars from multiple continents honored Wariboko with a book on his thoughts, The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko: Social Ethics, Economy, and Religion. In the same year, another group organized an international conference on his ideas and their impact on the global academy. Over forty papers were presented at this conference. Some of the papers presented at the 2020 conference will be published as Public Righteousness: The Performative Ethics of Human Flourishing (forthcoming). He is also the co-editor of Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Study.
Contributions: Sharon Kimberly Williams
Sharon Kimberly Williams is a clinical lecturer in religion and cultures in the Department of Religion at Iona University. She is a part-time faculty member for the Faith, Health, and Social Equity cohort in the Doctor of Ministry program at Drew University Theological School. Her clinical research training was completed at Brigham and Womenâs Hospital at Harvard Medical School through a partnership with the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew. Sharonâs research explores music, spirituality, healing, and social activism through the sociocultural lenses of Africana, Black church, Global South, and peace and justice studies. A former justice artist for the Social Justice Leadership Project at Drew, Sharon has performed sacred music and poetry all around the world. She is currently finishing up her first book manuscript, a collection of creative nonfiction essays titled Breath | Voice | Fire.
Contributions: An Yountae
An Yountae is an associate professor of religious studies at California State University, Northridge. Dr. An specializes in religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. His research focuses on the construction of religion, race, and political identity in colonial and postcolonial Americas. He is author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016), and The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making (forthcoming 2023, Duke University Press). He is co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021).
