Through the Eyes of Titans: Finding Courage to Redeem the Soul of a Nation with Danjuma Gibson
Oct. 23, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET
Online Webinar via Zoom / In-Person at Barbour Library
Registration is now closed. Local friends are invited to attend in-person at Barbour Library.
Through the Eyes of Titans (Wipf & Stock, 2024) seeks to humanize people we have idealized. Readers are invited to challenge racial hatred and injustice in their own context by looking to the lives of historical figures who have faced the challenges we currently face. By examining the self-care practices of personalities like Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Benjamin Elijah Mays, and Martin Luther King Jr., this book examines the practices of introspection and self-work these historical figures engaged in that enabled them to fulfill the body of work they are celebrated for today. By humanizing these historical titans, we can emulate similar practices of self-care and introspection in our own lives that can equip us in continuing the ongoing work of dismantling structures of racial hatred and oppression, and promoting freedom, love, equity, and justice to redeem the soul of a nation.
Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul's Letters with Joseph A. Marchal
Dec. 4, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET
Online Webinar via Zoom
Registration will resume shortly.
The letters of Paul are among the most commonly cited biblical texts in ongoing cultural and religious disputes about gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Appalling Bodies (Oxford University Press, 2020) reframes these uses of the letters by reaching past Paul toward other, far more fascinating figures that appear before, after, and within the letters: androgynous females, castrated males, enslaved people, and barbaric foreigners. Each of these ancient figures deployed in these letters is situated within a specifically Roman imperial setting, an ambiance that cast them as complicated, debased, and dangerous. While the letters repeat and reinscribe the prevailing perspectives on this constellation of embodied figures, this project repositions them by implementing key insights from queer studies. In juxtaposing them against more recent figures of gender and sexual variation, also subject to vilification and marginalization, this project provides a series of alternative angles on these figures and the assemblies who spark and receive these letters, then or now.
