Victor Aguilan

Professor of Christian Ethics
Silliman University

Dwight Hopkins

Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School

He graduated from Groton (Boarding) School and Harvard University (BA). Professor Hopkins initiated and managed a 14-country network to think about the practices of building healthy communities and healthy individuals in communities. With representatives from Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, Japan, India, England, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, and the USA, the network forged learning about neighbors through neighbors sharing their cultures. Indeed, in international transactions of business, politics, and religions, one of the greatest challenges is lack of cultural understanding. Restated, cultures facilitate harmony and balance for the purpose of another world is possible in emerging markets. A higher vision and transcendent values glue the global together spiritually with wealth management. He was Visiting Professor at Renmin (People’s) University, Beijing, China (course on “The History of Western Civilization”) and Visiting Lecturer at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Surrey International Institute, Dalian, China (ten lectures on “China and the West: Cross Cultural Communication”). Prof. Hopkins is a constructive theologian, meaning he focuses on innovation and people having agency. His classes combine the humanities with wealth. He continues to work on "faith plus wealth equals freedom" -- a practice of fulfilling one's mission while owing no one or no institution anything. His classes include black ownership of wealth, social entrepreneurship, can capitalism do good, black and liberation theologies, and contemporary models of theology.

Brigitte Kahl

Professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York

Brigitte Kahl is an innovative New Testament scholar whose work has been groundbreaking in Pauline studies. She brings a new perspective to Biblical scholarship by analyzing the dynamic relationship between the New Testament and the Roman Empire. In her pioneering book, Galatians Re-Imagined: Reading with the Eyes of the Vanquished (2010), Dr. Kahl re-defines the traditional paradigm of Pauline interpretation and radically recasts justification by faith as a theology of resistance and transformation.

A native of East Germany and an ordained minister, Dr. Kahl studied and taught at Humboldt University in Berlin between 1970 and 1997, earning two doctorates in New Testament and Ecumenics (1983/86). Her first major publication in German (1986) dealt with the theological and political dialectics of the Gospel for the Poor and the Gospel for the Gentiles in Luke-Acts. She worked with the World Council of Churches and held a chair in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation at Paderborn University in Westphalia before joining the faculty at Union in 1998. She is also an Associate Professor at the Religion Department of Columbia University. Her classes at Union engage in Critical Re-Imagination of Biblical texts and contexts. This novel interpretive approach and pedagogical method draws on the use of ancient art and architecture to illuminate imperial Roman constructs of power and identity, and to show how New Testament texts both reflect and contradict them. She also analyzes the way in which this power dynamic is embedded in contemporary Western civilization.

From 2004 onwards, Dr. Kahl played a primary role in organizing Union’s two landmark conferences and a series of consultations on New Testament and Roman Empire. A leading feminist interpreter, she collaborated as an inclusive-language translator and consultant in the much-debated new German Bible translation Die Bibel in gerechter Sprache (2006) and other projects. Her teaching involves close cooperation with the Poverty Initiative at Union which co-taught her courses on “Reading the Bible with the Poor” and “Paul and Poverty.” She has published and lectured extensively, both in English and German on Paul, Luke/Acts, Genesis and a broad range of topics in biblical interpretation, with an emphasis on the intersecting areas of peace and ecology, gender and social justice, anti-Judaism and anti-Islamism. Her current research interests include trans-disciplinary approaches to Paul, Roman antiquity, semiotics of images and architecture, empire-critical and post-colonial hermeneutics, Pergamon, Asia Minor and ancient Galatia/Gaul. She is working on a feminist, empire-critical commentary on Galatians through the lens of ancient art and an Aesthetics of Resistance informed by Peter Weiss and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Simangaliso Kumalo

Dean of the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Pietermaritzburg

He is the Director of the Centre for Constructive Theology in Southern Africa. He is also the Co-founding Editor of the Critical Investigation on Humanitarian AID in Africa (CIHA). He is also the immediate past-President of the Seth Mokitimi Methodist Seminary in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa (2016-2018). His research focus is on Religion and Governance, Religion and the Environment, Church and Politics and Public Theology and the Social History of Methodism in Southern Africa. He has written six books and over 60 chapters in books and academic journals.

Monica Melanchthon

Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament Studies, Pilgrim Theological College, within the University of Divinity (Melbourne, Australia)

Monica teaches Hebrew Bible/Old Testament studies. She is a graduate of the United Theological College, Bangalore (BD) and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, USA (Th.M. and PhD). Born and raised in India, she taught Hebrew Bible studies and Women’s Studies at the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, Chennai, India, before coming to Australia in 2012.

Monica is active in the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). She is currently on the editorial boards of Bible and Critical Theory, HBTH and JFSR. She is also the President of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies committed to fostering biblical studies in Asia.

Monica positions herself as a feminist advocate and liberation theologian, committed to producing reflections and texts that resist and counter cultures and languages of dominance that exclude the voices of the oppressed. she has contributed toward developing Dalit and Indian Feminist hermeneutics and theologies. Her approach to the Biblical text is critical, contextual, interdisciplinary and liberative. She draws on insights derived from the lived experiences and social biographies of the marginalized, particularly women and dalits to interpret the biblical text. She employs the ‘contrapuntal method’ that has evolved for her out of her engagement with difference and plurality, enabling her to juxtapose the biblical text alongside those texts beyond the biblical canon, written, oral, and those in the making, texts which for varied reasons, have been suppressed and left out of the traditional ecclesial process of selection and rejection. Gender, religious plurality, caste and more recently, issues of ecology have dominated her theological reflection, thinking and praxis.

Monica loves the classroom and the opportunity to engage with students. Her involvement in theological and religious education is driven by the passion and conviction that the Christian Scriptures should meet people at the point of their needs and struggles. Through her teaching she seeks to enable students to read the Bible with ‘suspicious hope,’ mindful of both its distortions and possibilities. Besides foundational units that introduce the student to the world of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the varied methods and approaches to the reading of the Biblical text, Monica has also designed units that attend to the Psalms, the book of Genesis, the Prophets, the OT apocryphal books, contemporary approaches to the reading of the Hebrew text and issues of gender, violence, justice, and culture as presented within the Biblical text.

Monica welcomes the opportunity to work with students interested in researching the Hebrew Bible in general but would be excited about those projects that seek to bring the Hebrew text into conversation with issues of culture, gender, other scriptural traditions, and social issues; those open to employing new and emerging approaches and methodologies and engaging sources also from the non-Western world. Monica is an ordained Lutheran minister and serves the academy and the wider church as speaker, theological reflector, and bible study leader.

Saronjini Nadar

Desmond Tutu SARChI Research Chair in Religion and Social Justice at the University of the Western Cape

She obtained her PhD in 2003 from the erstwhile University of Natal (now UKZN), where she also held the position of coordinator of the International Network in Advanced Theological Education (INATE) from 2002 to 2005. The network was based in eight countries and spanned five continents. In 2008, she was appointed to a permanent position as the Director of the Gender and Religion programme which she co-founded. She returned to this position in 2014 after a two-year tenure as the Dean of Research in the College of Humanities at UKZN in 2012 and 2013. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011 and Full Professor in 2014. Her numerous publications span diverse topics of research at the intersections of gender studies and religion, including gender- based violence, HIV, masculinity studies and most recently gender in higher education. She sits on five international journal editorial boards including the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and she is also the editor-in-chief of the African Journal of Gender and Religion. Nadar is a B rated scholar by the National Research Foundation and has won numerous awards for teaching and research, among them the Department of Science and Technology Distinguished Young Woman in Science award in 2012; the Vice-Chancellors Research Award at UKZN in 2015; and the Distinguished Teachers Award in 2013. In October 2022, Prof Nadar was inaugurated as a Member of the prestigious Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) at its annual Awards Ceremony, along with 28 of the country’s leading scholars and scientists.

Prof Nadar is a transdisciplinary researcher within the fields of gender and religion, with a more broad focus on religion and social justice – spanning issues of race, class, gender and sexuality. Her research thus examines the ways in which culture and religion sustain (and also hold resources for overcoming) particular forms of oppression which, in its most extreme form, can manifest in many forms of violence – physical, sexual, epistemic. This work at the intersections of religious studies and gender studies led her to a special interest in studying and developing theories of feminism in Africa, and more recently she has developed an interest in gender and higher education research. She is interested in the feminist episteme in the context of the study of religion, and the various ways in which feminist knowledge is produced in a fragmented and fragile South African academy. As a research chair, Prof Nadar is involved primarily in postgraduate supervision. Students who work with Prof Nadar work within an interdisciplinary framework with a focus on religion and social justice. Nadar is an activist-academic who is committed to authentic and intersectional socially engaged scholarship. Hence, her commitment is to an applied research paradigm, seeking to produce and disseminate research for social utility.

Kwok Pui-lan

Dean’s Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University

She is the past president of the American Academy of Religion and has authored and edited numerous books on Asian and Asian American feminist theology, biblical interpretation, and postcolonial criticism. An internationally known theologian, she is the author of The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective; Postcolonial Politics and Theology, and Globalization, Gender, and Peacebuilding. She is the co-editor of Beyond Colonial Anglicanism and Anglican Women on Church and Mission. Her most recent edited volume is Transpacific Political Theology by Baylor University Press. She received the Lanfranc Award for Education and Scholarship from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2021.

Mitri Raheb

Founder and President of Dar al-Kalima University in Bethlehem

The most widely published Palestinian theologian to date, Dr. Raheb is the author and editor of 50 books including: Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible; In the Eye of the Storm: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire; Politics of Persecution: Middle Eastern Christians in an Age of Empire; The Cross in Contexts: Suffering and Redemption in Palestine; Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes; His books and numerous articles have been translated so far into thirteen languages. Rev. Raheb served as the senior pastor of the Christmas Lutheran Church in Bethlehem from June 1987 to May 2017 and as the President of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land from 2011-2016.  A social entrepreneur, Rev. Raheb has founded several NGO‟s including the Christian Academic Forum for Citizenship in the Arab World (CAFCAW). He is a founding and board member of the National Library of Palestine, and a founding member of Bright Stars of Bethlehem, a US 501c3 non-for-profit organization. He is an elected member to the Palestinian National Council as well as the Palestinian Central Council.

Rev. Dr Raheb received in 2022 a Honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Wartburg Theological Seminary. In 2017 he received the Tolerance Award from the European Academy of Science and Arts, in 2015 the Olof Palme Prize. In 2012 the German Media Prize was awarded to Dr. Raheb. Launched in 1992, this award was mainly granted to Heads of States, including President Obama (2016) the German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2009), Bill Clinton (1999), Nelson Mandela (1998), King Hussein of Jordan (1997), Boris Yeltsin (1996), President Arafat (1995), Yitshak Rabin (1995). He also received for his outstanding contribution to Christian education through research and publication‟ an Honorary Doctorate from Concordia University in Chicago (2003)   and   for   his interfaith   work   the “International Mohammad Nafi Tschelebi Peace Award” of the Central Islam Archive in Germany (2006) and in 2007 the well-known German Peace Award of Aachen.

The work of Dr. Raheb has received wide media attention from major international media outlets and networks including CNN, ABC, CBS, 60 Minutes, BBC, ARD, ZDF, DW, BR, Premiere, Raiuno, Stern, The Economist, Newsweek, Al-Jazeera, al-Mayadin, RT, LBC, Vanity Fair, and others.

Dr.  Raheb holds a  Doctorate  in  Theology  from  the  Philipps  University  at  Marburg, Germany.  He is married to Najwa Khoury and has two daughters, Dana & Tala. For more: www.mitriraheb.org

Anthony Reddie

Professor of Black Theology; Director of the Centre for Black Theology, Oxford Regent’s Park College

My scholarship in Black theology has been Informed by my doctorate in Education and Practical theology, undertaken at the University of Birmingham with Professor John Hull. This has given me an Interdisciplinary method to the subject that Is somewhat different from the more classical, systematic approaches to Black theology used by my many peers in the United States. My consistent research Interest has been the interface between Black theology and decolonial/transformative education as a means of conscientization and empowerment. I am the author of numerous books, articles, and book chapters. My more recent books Include Theologising Brexit: A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique (Routledge, 2010), and the republished Is God Colour-Blind? Insights from Black Theology for Christian Faith and Ministry (SPCK, 2020) and Intercultural Preaching [co-edited with Seidel Abel Boargenes and Pamela Searle], (Regent’s Park College, 2021). I am an A rated, Leading International Researcher with the South African National Research Foundation (NRF). I am also a recipient of the Archbishop of Canterbury's 2020 Lanfranc Award for 'exceptional and sustained contribution to Black theology In Britain and beyond.'

Jung Mo Sung

Professor of Religious Studies at Methodist University of São Paulo, Brazil

Jung Mo Sung is a Roman Catholic lay theologian trained in theology, ethics, and education. Born in South Korea and has been living in Brazil since 1966, he teaches in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Methodist University of São Paulo, Brazil. He works within the paradigm of liberation theology and is considered a "next generation" theologian-practitioner. His research focuses on the relationship between theology and economics, especially the theological aspects of capitalist economics and the economic aspects of Christian theology. He has written many books on theological critique of political economy, including the following titles in English: Desire, Market and Religion (SCM Press, 2007); Beyond the Spirit of Empire (SCM Press, 2009), co-authored with Néstor Miguez and Joerg Rieger; and The Subject, Capitalism and Religion: Horizons of Hope in Complex Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Miguel De La Torre

Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado

He has served as the elected 2012 President of the Society of Christian Ethics and served as the Executive Officer for the Society of Race, Ethnicity and Religion (2012-17). Dr. De La Torre is a recognized international Fulbright scholar who has taught courses at the Cuernavaca Center for Intercultural Dialogue on Development (Mexico), Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (Indonesia), University of Johannesburg (South Africa), Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany). Additionally, he has lectured at Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana (Costa Rica), The Association for Theological Education in South East Asia (Thailand) and the Council of World Mission (Mexico and Taiwan). Advocating for an ethics of place, De La Torre has taken students on immersion classes to Cuba, Guatemala, the Peruvian Amazon, and the Mexico/U.S. border to walk the migrant trails. Among multiple yearly speaking engagements, he has also been a week-long speaker at the Chautauqua Institute, and the plenary address at the Parliament of World Religions. De La Torre has received several national book awards and is a frequent speaker at national and international scholarly religious events and meetings. He also speaks at churches and nonprofit organizations on the intersection of religion with race, class,  gender, and sexuality . In 2020, the American Academy of Religion bestowed on him the Excellence in Teaching Award. The following year, 2021, the American Academy also conferred upon him the Martin E. Marty Public Understanding of Religion Award. De La Torre is the first scholar to receive the two most prestigious awards presented by his guild and the first Latinx to receive either one of them.