Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan

Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan became Dean of the Drew Theological School and Professor of Hebrew Bible in 2011. A scholar of ancient Israelite and Near Eastern history, Dr. Kuan’s current research addresses Asian and Asian American hermeneutics, as well as approaches to biblical instruction for the churches. He is currently completing a commentary on the biblical book of Joshua.

Kuan began his career serving as an associate pastor from 1980 to 1983 in Malaysia. In 2002, he became an ordained elder and full member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. Since 2008, he has served as the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the UMC’s General Board of Higher Education and Ministry. In 2004, the Reconciling Ministries of the California-Nevada Annual Conference named him the winner of the Turtle Award for “sticking his neck out” for the LGBTQ community.

Dean Kuan previously served on the faculties of the Pacific School of Religion and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and the South East Asia Graduate School’s Regional Faculty. He also served as Old Testament Editor for the multi-volume New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible from 2006 to 2009. He currently serves on the Council of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Fernando F. Segovia

Fernando F. Segovia is the Oberlin Graduate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity in the Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University, where he is also a member of the Center for Latin American Studies. Professor Segovia has taught at Vanderbilt since 1984-1985, after a first appointment in the Department of Theology at Marquette University, where he taught for seven years.  He earned his doctoral degree in Early Christian Studies at the University of Notre Dame under the direction of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza.

Professor Segovia has been active in Biblical Studies and Theological Studies.  As a critic, his primary areas of interest and research at present include: method and theory in interpretation; ideological criticism and cultural studies; non-Western and minority traditions of interpretation; and Johannine Studies.  As a theologian, his primary area of expertise and publication are: non-Western theologies; minority theologies; and Latino religion and theology.  Among his recent works are the following: a volume coedited with R. S. Sugirtharajah, A Postcolonial Commentary of the New Testament Writings (T&T Clark) and a volume coedited with Randall Bailey and Benny Tat-Siong Liew, They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Semeia Studies).  At present, Professor Segovia is engaged in a variety of ongoing projects, from works on minority and postcolonial criticisms to works on Latino/a theology and the Cuban problematic.  Among his forthcoming works are The Future of the Biblical Past, coedited with Roland Boer, and Latino/a Criticism, coedited with Francisco Lozada, both for Semeia Studies.

Beyond his scholarly work, Professor Segovia has served as dissertation director for close to thirty students now, has participated in the governance of various professional societies and sat on the editorial board of many journals, has formed part of many academic and ecclesial projects throughout the world, and has lectured extensively nationally as well as internationally.

Cheryl Kirk-Duggan

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Ph.D., is Professor of Theology and Women’s studies at Shaw University Divinity School (Raleigh, NC). She holds a doctorate from Baylor University. The 2009 Shaw University Excellence in Research Recipient is author and editor of over twenty books and numerous articles; is an Ordained Elder in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Her research and teaching is interdisciplinary, liberationist, theoretical, and practical. She garnered activists/scholars to respond to Katrina in The Sky is Crying: Race, Class, and Natural Disaster (Abingdon, 2006). She works in interfaith and ecumenical contexts. Her forthcoming co-authored work with Marlon Hall, is Wake Up!: Hip Hop, Christianity, and the Black Church, from Abingdon Press, due out June, 2011. Known for her 6 P’s: professor, preacher, priest, prophet, poet, and performer, Dr. Kirk-Duggan is an avid athlete and musician, who completed her first marathon (2010), and practices hot yoga. She loves to tinker with her flowers, embraces laughter as her best medicine, with the quest for a foundational healthy, holistic, spiritual life. She resides in Raleigh with her beloved husband, Mike.

Tat-siong Benny Liew
Tat-siong Benny Liew is currently Professor of New Testament at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.  His is interested in transdisciplinary readings of the New Testament that take into consideration race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and colonialism/postcolonialism. In addition to being the author of Politics of Parousia (Brill, 1999) and What is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics (University of Hawaii, 2008), Liew has edited (with Gale Yee) The Bible in Asian American Literature (SBL, 2002), (with Randall Bailey and Fernando Segovia) They Were All Together in One Place? (SBL, 2009), and Postcolonial Interventions (Sheffield Phoenix, 2009).

Kenneth Ngwa

Kenneth Ngwa is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew University Theological School in Madison, New Jersey. His research interests are in the areas of ancient Israelite Wisdom Literature, African Proverbs, Orality, the History of Bible Reception, Narrative Ethics, and the Exodus story. His publications include The Hermeneutics of the ‘Happy’ Ending in Job 42:7-17 (2005) and a number of articles, including Did Job Suffer for Nothing? The Ethics of Piety, Presumption and the Reception of Disaster in the Prologue of Job (JSOT, March 2009); What do People say the Bible says? And you, What do you Say? (TTR 14/2, 2011); and Haggai in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora ed., Hugh Page (2010).

Born in Cameroon, Dr. Ngwa is an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon and a board member of the African Renaissance Ambassador, a non-governmental organization working for the continuous development of African continent. He enjoys spending time with his son Michael and playing soccer.

Workshop Leaders

Morris Davis

Morris Davis is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Associate Professor of the History of Christianity and Wesleyan/Methodist Studies at Drew Theological School. He also served as Scholar in Residence at the Burke Library of Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York for the 2010-2011 academic year.

Davis’s teaching and research are in the broader field of Christianity in the Americas including race, nationalism, and the history of missions; slavery and racial segregation among Christians; Wesleyan and Methodist movements; and Christians and war. He is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled, Seeing Need, Spreading Christian Civilization: Photography and North American Missions, 1880-1940. Other publications include The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era (http://www.nyupress.org/books/bookdetails.aspx?bookId=502, New York University Press, 2008); “Methodism: Consolidation and Reunion, 1865-1939,” chapter in The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, ed. Peter Forsaith, William Gibson and Martin Wellings. (Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming 2011); and “Early Twentieth-Century Methodist Missions Photography: The Problems of Home.” (Click here to view, Methodist Review 2, 2010:33–67).

Danna Fewell

Danna Nolan Fewell is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey.  Her major works include: The Children of Israel: Reading the Bible for the Sake of Our Children (Abingdon, 2003), Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 1993), Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Abingdon, 1993), Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992); Circle of Sovereignty: Plotting Politics in the Book of Daniel (Abingdon, 1991), Compromising Redemption: Relating Characters in the Book of Ruth (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990). With Gary Phillips she has published Bible and Ethics of Reading (Society of Biblical Literature, 1997), Representing the Irreparable: The Shoah, the Bible, and the Art of Samuel Bak (Syracuse University Press/Pucker Art Publications, 2008), and Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak (Syracuse University Press/Pucker Art Publications, 2009).

Gary Simpson

Gary Simpson is described by Cornel West as ”an organic intellectual,” Gary V. Simpson has spent the past twenty years serving as Senior Pastor of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York, a progressive intergenerational, urban congregation of 3000 that has pioneered in the areas of congregation-based elementary education and social services to both youth and the aged. Dr. Simpson brings that experience into the classroom at Drew as Assistant Professor of Homiletics. As both scholar and Master Practitioner, his scholarly interests include Pastoral formation and Identity; preaching through biography, preaching and leadership; and the nature and history of Black Churches and Preaching. Dr. Simpson was Visiting Adjunct Professor at Yale Divinity School in the Spring of 2011.

Hyo-Dong Lee

Professor Hyo-Dong Lee joined the faculty of the Drew University School of Theology and its Graduate Department of Religion as Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology in September 2007.  He is a native of South Korea and holds a B.A. from Yonsei University, an M.A. from McGill University, an M.Div. from the United Theological College, Montreal, and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. His teaching and research interests lie in the area broadly defined as theology of religions and comparative theology, and more specifically, a dialogue between the Christian/Western theological tradition and Northeast Asian religious thought, including Confucianism Daoism, Tonghak, etc. His interests extend also to postcolonial theories and European postmodern thought. His publications are: “Interreligious Dialogue as a Politics of Recognition: A Postcolonial Re-reading of Hegel for Interreligious Solidarity” in The Journal of Religion 85, no. 45 (2005); “‘Empty and Tranquil, and Without Any Sign, and Yet All Things Are Already Luxuriantly Present’: A Comparative-Theological Reflection on the Manifold Spirit” in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, Ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel C. Schneider (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).  He is currently finishing a book, which is a comparative-theological examination of the notion of Spirit, drawing on Hegel, Tillich, Whitehead, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Donghak, and postcolonial theory.

Kathryn M. Ott

Kathryn Ott is Assistant Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Drew Theological School. She holds a doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Her research focuses on how moral choices affect who we are, who we want to become, and how we understand and educate about moral decision-making.  Her recent academic and activist work place children and youth at the center of inquiry using a feminist and critical social ethics lens.  She recently published “Searching for an Ethic: Sexuality, Children, and Moral Agency” in New Feminist Christianity: Many Voices, Many Views, in addition to working on her forthcoming book, Faith, Family, and Sexuality: Talking to our Kids from Toddlers to Teens with Westminster John Knox Press.

He Qi

He Qi was among the many people sent to the countryside during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As a young man, he escaped hard labor by painting pictures of chairman Mao Zedong. He Qi earned a doctorate in religious art from Nanjing Art Institute, having studied medieval art in Hamburg, Germany. He was a professor of Christian Art at Nanjing Theological Seminary before moving to St. Paul, Minnesota in 2004. He is a member of the Chinese Art Association, and a council member of the ACAA (Asia Christian Art Association). His work has been seen in many international journals and media outlets, and he has exhibited in Asia, Europe and the United States. He Qi is especially influenced by the simple and beautiful artwork of the people in rural China. Within that framework, he seeks to redefine the relationship between people and spirituality with bold colors, embellished shapes and thick strokes. His work is a blend of Chinese folk art and traditional painting technique with the iconography of the Western Middle Ages and Modern Art. A monograph of the work of He Qi was published by OMSC in 2006; also, reproductions and critical essays can be found in the MOBIA catalog, “The Christian Story: Five Asian Artists Today.”