Featured Speakers

Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann is widely regarded as one of the preeminent contemporary Bible scholars. After earning degrees at Eden Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary in New York City, he pursued a long and distinguished teaching career. His nearly sixty books include The Prophetic Imagination, The Book that Breathes New Life, and Redescribing Reality. He was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series Genesis: A Living Conversation. Today he is professor emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA. His most recent book, Journey to the Common Good, was published in 2010.

Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon considered becoming a nun, but instead became a writer who Bill Moyers called “one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary Catholic life in America” when she was featured on his PBS series Faith & Reason. Her reputation as a novelist was established with the 1979 publication of Final Payments, followed by In the Company of Women a year later. Her other novels include Men and Angels, The Other Side, The Rest of Life (three novellas), and Pearl. She has won three O. Henry awards for best short story and is the recipient of the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her most recent work of nonfiction is Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels.

Teresa Okure

Teresa Okure, SHCJ, is professor of New Testament and Gender Hermeneutics at the Catholic Institute of West Africa. Her publications and lectures have drawn international acclaim. She was co-guest editor of a special issue of the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church on ecclesiology in Africa and is an editor of Texts@Contexts, a book series featuring cutting-edge scholarship on select books of the Bible from authors representing a rich array of social, cultural, and ethnic locations (Augsburg Fortress). She received her Ph.D. from Fordham University, New York.

Gerald O. West

Gerald O. West led the team that designed the Bible studies that were an integral and transformative element of the global Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference 2008. He is Professor in the School of Theology, University of Kwazulu-Natal and Director of the Ujamaa Center for Biblical and Theological Community Development and Research in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. His books include Reading Otherwise: Socially Engaged Biblical Scholars Reading with Their Local Communities; Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation: Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context; and The Academy of the Poor: Toward a Dialogical Reading of the Bible.

Panelists

Steed V. Davidson

Steed V. Davidson, preacher, opening eucharist, and panelist, is associate professor of Old Testament at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. His research interests center on Israelite prophetic literature and postcolonial studies. His book Empire and Exile offers a postcolonial treatment of the book of Jeremiah. In his classes he pays critical attention to reader and text as they interact in varying contexts as a means of developing competencies in reading from multiple contexts. Dr. Davidson received his PhD from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

Eric D. Barreto,  guest panelist, is assistant professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He previously served in Atlanta as an adjunct professor at the Candler School of Theology and McAfee School of Theology. He was ordained into the Gospel Ministry by Peachtree Baptist Church in Atlanta. His most recent publications include two entries, “Puerto Ricans” and “Hispanic Theological Initiative,” in Hispanic American Religious Cultures (ABC CLIO).

Mary Chilton Callaway, closing panelist, is associate professor of biblical studies at Fordham University in New York City. She was a member of the design team for the Bible Studies at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, which have been published as In the Beginning Was the Word (SPCK). Her other publications include Sing, O Barren One: A Study in Comparative Midrash (SBL) and chapters in To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and their Application (Westminster John Knox Press), The Parallel Apocrypha (Oxford University Press), and Prophetic Speech (Sheffield Academic Press). She is currently completing a commentary, Jeremiah through the Centuries, to be published by Wiley-Blackwell.

Amy E. Meverden,  guest panelist, is pursuing a PhD in Hebrew Bible at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She holds a Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a Master of Arts in Humanities and Social Thought from the Draper School at New York University.  She is also pursuing discernment for ordination in the Episcopal Church USA.