Scholar-Activist Encounter: Activist Hermeneutics of Liberation and the Bible

May 01, 2025, 7:30pm Eastern US Time

How do activism and scholarship contribute to our understanding of Scripture in the world today?

In honor of May Day, people of all faiths and backgrounds are invited to join a special Scholar-Activist Encounter featuring the co-editors of Activist Hermeneutics of Liberation and the Bible, recently published by Routledge Press’s New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series. Jin Young Choi and Gregory L. Cuéllar will share about the origins and goals of this anthology, which seeks to resource the intersections between minoritized understandings of the Bible and international organizing for justice and social transformation. In response, we will discuss how the biblical insights in this book resonate with the history of May Day and the themes and priorities of today’s movements for immigrant and worker justice.

PLEASE NOTE: Registration will be open until 7:00pm Eastern US Time on the day of the event.

Speakers:

Dr. Jin Young Choi is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins and the Baptist Missionary Training School Professorial Chair in Biblical Studies at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School. She is the author of Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment: An Asian and Asian American Feminist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the co-editor of numerous volumes including Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Joerg Rieger, Pickwick Publications, 2020). Choi’s work has focused on the intersections of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, empire, and early Christianity, employing transnational and decolonial feminist criticism and diaspora studies. As a former Academic Fellow of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University, she is working on The Mystery of the Divine Economy: Reading Mark in Times of Global Crises (Westminster John Knox, forthcoming). Choi has served the Society of Biblical Literature in several capacities and sits on the editorial boards of International Voices in Biblical Studies and the Journal of Biblical Literature.

Dr. Gregory L. Cuéllar is the Full Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and the Ruth A. Campbell Chair in Biblical Studies at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. As an international biblical scholar, Dr. Cuéllar is interested in counterintuitive ways of reading biblical texts, in particular those that are rooted in a decolonizing discourse of liberation. His research explores topics related to the U.S. Mexico-Borderlands, immigration detention (UK and US), anti-black and brown racism, and the intersections of religion and migration. He has authored numerous books, including Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border: A borderland Hermeneutic (Routledge 2020), and is currently working on Religion in Immigrant Detention: Securing Faiths in a State of Removal(Palgrave, forthcoming). He has been a visiting scholar at the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) and the Centre for Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford, and is the co-founder of a refugee artwork project called Arte de Lágrimas (Art of Tears).

The Center and Library for the Bible and Social Justice invites you to join us for an interactive dialogue exploring the interfaces between scholarship and activism. How do these ways of being contribute to our understanding of Scripture in the world today? Let’s come together to learn from each other. Most events take place on the third Thursday of the month at 4:30pm Pacific Time / 7:30pm Eastern Time. We do not meet every month, and occasionally meet on a different night.

See the full schedule of the Scholar-Activist Encounter series. For questions, email info@clbsj.org.