Society Leadership

  • The focus of Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre’s academic pursuit is social ethics within contemporary U.S. thought, specifically how religion affects race, class, and gender oppression. Since obtaining his doctoral in 1999, he has authored over a hundred articles and published thirty-three books (five of which won national awards). He presently serves as Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. A Fulbright scholar, he has taught in Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Germany. Within his guild he served as the 2012 President of the Society of Christian Ethics. Within the academy, he is a past-director to the American Academy of Religion; served as the past chair of the Committee for Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession, past chair of the Ethics Program Section; authored the “AAR Career Guide;” served on the Program Committee, and presently serves on the editorial board of JAAR. Additionally, he is the co-founder and present executive director of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion and the founding editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. A scholar-activist, Dr. De La Torre has written numerous articles in popular media and has served on several civic organizations. Recently, he wrote the screenplay to a documentary on immigration, Trails of Hope and Terror the Movie, which has screened in over eighteen film festivals, winning over seven film awards.

  • Juan M. Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt Divinity School. His research and teaching focus on the intersections of racial identity, religion, popular culture, and political activism in American society. Floyd-Thomas is author of The Origins of Black Humanism (2008) and Liberating Black Church History (2014) as well as co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (2007) and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture (2016). He is currently working on two book-length projects: an edited volume on religious issues during the age of Obama as well as a history of Black religion in Harlem.

  • Christopher M. Driscoll is associate professor of religion studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA and owner/managing editor of Exact Rush Multimedia Publishing. Driscoll is a scholar of race, religion, and culture, and historical and contemporary white U.S. and European religious, philosophical, and theological thought and traditions, hip hop culture, and existentialisms/ humanisms. His interdisciplinary work combines social, critical, philosophical, and hermeneutical theories and methods extending beyond the academic study of religion. Driscoll has lectured extensively across the U.S. and internationally on the topic of whiteness and religion. He is author of several books, and finds joy in helping others bring their books to life. With Exact Rush, his hope is to enable opportunities for writers and creatives, both scholars and nonacademics, to earn a living wage from their creative and research endeavors, with or without an institutional affiliation.

     

  • Lakisha R. Lockhart’s research interests are in the areas of religious education; practical, liberation, and Womanist theologies; ethics and society; multiple intelligences; embodied faith and pedagogies; theological aesthetics’ theopoetics; creativity, imagination, and play. Her teaching takes seriously the benefits and necessity of play, movement, aesthetics, creative arts, and embodiment. For Lockhart, the body is a locus for doing theology and theological reflection. Ordained to ministry in the non-denominational tradition, she recognizes the importance of teaching Christian education for the strengthening of the church. She has authored and co-authored numerous publications and book chapters, including United Against Racism: Churches for Change: Facilitator’s Guide; “Enfleshing Catechesis Through Embodied Space” in the book Together Along the Way: Conversations Inspired by the Directory for Catechesis, among other writings, and also was featured in the “Just Womanist” series for The Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership. Her awards and honors include “Millennial Womanist to Watch” from The Millennial Womanist Project, “Images of Success” from Claflin University, and a First Wornom Innovative Grant from the Religious Education Association Project.

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  • Rev. Laura Mariko Cheifetz is the Assistant Dean of Admissions, Vocation, and Student Life at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), a graduate of North Park University (MBA, ’11), McCormick Theological Seminary (M.Div. ’05), and Western Washington University (BA in Sociology, 2000). She is the co-author and editor of “Church on Purpose: Reinventing Discipleship, Community, & Justice” (Judson Press) and co-editor and contributor to “Race in America: Christians Respond to the Crisis” (Westminster John Knox Press), among other publications. Laura is multiracial Asian American of Japanese and white Jewish descent. She was the fourth generation of her family to be born in California, and grew up in eastern Oregon and western Washington. Laura and her partner, Jessica Vazquez Torres, the National Program Manager for Crossroads Antiracism Organizing & Training, live in Nashville, Tenn. with their rescue pup. They enjoy all their nieces and nephews, and hope to be such fabulous aunties that the kids smuggle good booze to them in their retirement home.

  • W. David Nelson currently serves as the Executive Director of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. As a founding member of the SRER, he has also served as its Treasurer. David is a Jewish Studies scholar with a specialization in biblical interpretation and hermeneutics. He has published six books, including Re-Presenting Texts: Jewish and Black Biblical Interpretation (Gorgias Press, 2013) and Exodus in the Jewish Experience: Echoes and Reverberations (Lexington Books, 2015). He currently serves as Chair of the Society of Biblical Literature's Midrash Section and as co-editor of its publication series with Gorgias Press. He has held the positions of Chair of the Religious Studies and Philosophy Department at Groton School and the inaugural Rosenthal Associate Professor and Director of Jewish Studies at TCU and Brite Divinity School, and has facilitated a range of institutional diversification, inclusion, and inter-religious endeavors and initiatives.

  • Blanche Bong Cook is the Curt and Linda Rodin Professor of Law and Social Justice at Loyola University Law School. Before joining Loyola Law, she was a tenured Associate Professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan and the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law in Lexington, Kentucky. Before joining the academy, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney with the Department of Justice, where she specialized in large-scale drug and sex-trafficking prosecutions. As a federal prosecutor, she briefed and/or argued more than 44 federal appeals. Professor Cook clerked for the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She was also an associate at Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone in Detroit and Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago, where she specialized in employment discrimination, labor law, and sexual harassment litigation and prevention training. Professor Cook has established herself as a leading expert on sex trafficking by problematizing the entire spectrum of sex-trafficking prosecutions and the commercialization and exploitation of women and girls. Professor Cook is a frequent and sought-after speaker at workshops, conferences, and sexual harassment and implicit bias trainings.

  • Jacqueline M. Hidalgo is a Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. Prior to moving to USD, she had been a Professor of Latina/o/x Studies and Religion at Williams College, where she also served as chair of Religion; chair of Latina/o Studies; Associate Dean for Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences. A past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) as well as the New England/Eastern Canada Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, she is the author of Latina/o/x Studies and Biblical Studies in Brill Research Perspectives in Biblical Interpretation 3.4 (2020), as well as Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). With Efraín Agosto, she also co-edited the collection of essays Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a student of scriptures as human social phenomena with particular interests in how and why certain Latina/o/x communities make, contest, and refashion their own scriptures. As a consequence, she examines the intersections of scriptures, apocalypticism, utopianism, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion relationally in the U.S. and in relationship to deep histories in the Americas and the ancient Mediterranean.

  • Tink Tinker is professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology where he has taught courses in American Indian cultures, history, and religious traditions; cross-cultural and Third-World theologies; and justice and peace studies since 1985. He is a frequent speaker on these topics both in the U.S. and internationally. His publications include American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (2008); Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (2004); and Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Genocide (1993). He co-authored A Native American Theology (2001); and he is co-editor of Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (2003), and Fortress Press’ Peoples’ Bible (2008). Dr. Tinker has volunteered in the Indian community as (non–stipendiary) director of Four Winds American Indian Survival Project in Denver for two decades. In that capacity he functions in the urban Indian community as a traditional American Indian spiritual leader. He is past president of the Native American Theological Association and a member of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians. Firmly committed to the ecumenical movement, he has been active in volunteer capacities with several denominations at the national level, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. He currently serves as an “Honorary Advisor” to IMADR, the International Movement against all Forms of Discrimination and Racism; and he also serves locally on the Leadership Council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado.

  • Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Associate Professor of Ethics and Society Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and College of Arts and Sciences and Executive Director of both the Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) and the nationally-acclaimed Black Religious Scholars Group (BRSG) and serves as co-founder of the Society for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Religion (SRER). Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of ethics, feminist/womanist studies, Black Church studies, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies with an overall approach to the study of Christian social ethics that engages broad questions of moral agency, cultural memory, ethical responsibility and social justice. Drawing upon socio-historical methods and liberation ethics, her work in Christian social ethics has a threefold focus—race, gender, and class—and she is equally interested in the challenges of religious pluralism, social justice and the political world. 

  • Edwin David Aponte is Dean of the Theological School at Drew University and Professor of Religion and Culture. Before his role at Drew, Aponte was executive director of Louisville Institute in Louisville, Kentucky. Prior to Louisville, Aponte served as dean and chief executive administrator at Palmer Theological Seminary, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty at Christian Theological Seminary, and vice president of academic affairs and dean of the seminary at Lancaster Theological Seminary. Aponte has a diverse and extensive background in higher education. He served for nearly a decade in the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, where he was both a tenured professor in Christianity and culture and a director of advanced studies. In addition, Aponte has served with the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, the Commission on Accrediting of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), the Commission on Accreditation of Marriage and Family Therapy Education, the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association, and the Middle States Commission of Higher Education (MSCHE). Aponte earned his bachelor’s degree from Gordon College, his Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and his Master of Arts in Religion and PhD in Religion and Society from Temple University.