Not Wanting a Thing to Be the Thing is the first stroke memoir written by a Black woman biblical scholar. Smith's story is her mother's story, and it is not. It is the story of other stroke survivors, and it is not. It is a unique telling of the civil war that erupts in her body. It is a journey of not knowing, awareness, survival, fragmentation, discovery, and recovery. Smith's story is inspiring, amazing, brilliant, funny, thought-provoking, and revelatory. She has a gift for bringing he...

Chloe and Her People offers an Africana Womanist reading of First Corinthians that privileges the knowledge, experiences, histories, traditions, voices, and artifacts of Black women and the Black community that challenge or dissent from Paul's rhetorical epistemic constructions. Smith reads First Corinthians dialogically from the perspective of oppressed and marginalized readers situated in front of the text and those muted within and behind the letter. Struggling toward unmitigated freedo...

Womanist Sass and Talk Back is a contextual resistance text for readers interested in social (in)justice. Smith raises our consciousness about pressing contemporary social (in)justice issues that impact communities of color and the larger society. Systemic or structural oppression and injustices, police profiling and brutality, oppressive pedagogy, and gendered violence are placed in dialogue with sacred (con)texts. This book provides fresh intersectional readings of sacred (con)texts that...

Too often the negative characterization of "others" in the biblical text is applied to groups and persons beyond the text whom we wish to define as the Other. Otherness is a synthetic and political social construct that allows us to create and maintain boundaries between "them" and "us." The other that is too similar to us is most problematic. This book demonstrates how proximate characters are constructed as the Other in the Acts of the Apostles. Charismatics, Jews, and women are proximat...

Toward Decentering the New Testament is the first introductory text to the New Testament written by an African American woman biblical scholar and an Asian-American male biblical scholar. This text privileges the voices, scholarship, and concerns of minoritized nonwhite peoples and communities. It is written from the perspectives of minoritized voices. The first few chapters cover issues such as biblical interpretation, immigration, Roman slavery, intersectionality, and other topi...

Bitter the Chastening Rod follows in the footsteps of the first collection of African American biblical interpretation, Stony the Road We Trod (1991). Nineteen Africana biblical scholars contribute cutting-edge essays reading Jesus, criminalization, the enslaved, and whitened interpretations of the enslaved. They present pedagogical strategies for teaching, hermeneutics, and bible translation that center Black Lives Matter and black culture. Biblical narratives, news medi...

Nonwhite women primarily appear as marginalized voices, if at all, in volumes that address constructions of race/ethnicity and early Christian texts. Employing an intersectional approach, the contributors analyze historical, cultural, literary, and ideological constructions of racial/ethnic identities, which intersect with gender/sexuality class, religion, slavery, and/or power. Given their small numbers in academic biblical studies, this book represents a critical mass of nonwhite women s...

p>Each volume in the Insights series discusses discoveries and insights gained into biblical texts from a particular approach or perspective in current scholarship. Accessible and appealing to today’s students, each Insight volume discusses how this method, approach, or strategy was first developed and how its application has changed over time; what current questions arise from its use; what enduring insights it has produced; and what questions remain for future scholarship.Mitzi J...

We Are All Witnesses is a remarkable, sassy, creative, disruptive, and deeply personal textbook. It is like no other text on biblical interpretation. Smith and Newheart have produced a groundbreaking milestone book about how to do biblical interpretation that prioritizes justice and the reader's context. It is both memoir and metatestimony! The layperson, college students, and seminary students will find this book accessible. It is indeed creative, witty, and wayward!

I Found God in Me is the first womanist biblical hermeneutics reader. In it readers have access, in one volume, to articles on womanist interpretative theories and theology as well as cutting-edge womanist readings of biblical texts by womanist biblical scholars. This book is an excellent resource for women of color, pastors, and seminarians interested in relevant readings of the biblical text, as well as scholars and teachers teaching courses in womanist biblical hermeneutics, feminist in...

That Christian missionary efforts have long gone hand-in-hand with European colonization and American imperialist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is well recognized. The linchpin role played in those efforts by the Great Commissionthe risen Christs command to go into all the world and teach all nationshas more often been observed than analyzed, however. With the rise of European colonialism, the Great Commission was suddenly taken up with an eschatological urgency, ofte...