Rev. Dr. Andrea C. White, MDiv, PhD
Associate Professor of Theology & Culture
CONTACT
3041 Broadway, AD 420
New York, NY 10027
212-280-1363
awhite@uts.columbia.edu
EDUCATION
B.A., Oberlin College
M.Div., Yale University
Ph.D., The University of Chicago
BIOGRAPHY
The Rev. Dr. Andrea C. White is Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. She has served as Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and chair of the Black Theology Unit for the American Academy of Religion. Her research specializes in womanist theology and critical theory, philosophy of religion and phenomenology.
Her forthcoming volume is The Scandal of Flesh: Black Women’s Bodies, God, and Politics. She is also the author of The Back of God: A Theology of Otherness in Karl Barth and Paul Ricoeur, and editor of several future volumes including, Political Theology on Edge with Catherine Keller and Clayton Crocket, and The State of Black Theology.
She serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, the Black Theology Papers Project, and she is editor of the web forum Love, Struggle Resist, a critical, social and political forum for the progressive multireligious community.
Dr. White is a recipient of both the Lilly Theological Research Faculty Fellowship from The Association of Theological Schools and The Louisville Institute Book Grant for Minority Scholars.
She has delivered lectures in Brazil, Denmark, India, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and across the United States. She sits on the advisory boards for the Karl Barth Society of North America and Logia at the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She has served as a member of the Committee on the Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession and with the Theology and Religious Reflection steering committee for the American Academy of Religion. She also serves on the Committee on Teaching about the United Nations and is a founding member of The Carter Center’s Scholars in Action created to address gender violence against women and girls.
Dr. White is a recipient of Emory University’s 2016 Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award.
Prior to her appointment at Union, she served on the faculty at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in theology from The University of Chicago Divinity School, a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School with a concentration in philosophy of religion, and a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College with honors in philosophy. She is also an ordained American Baptist minister and served as a church pastor, hospice chaplain, and chaplain for children and adults with developmental disabilities.
previous COURSES
Political Theology, Fall 2016, Spring 2020
Politics of Hope, Spring 2022
Phenomenology of Violence, Fall 2018, Fall 2023
Phenomenology of the Body, Spring 2016, Fall 2019
Otherness of God, Fall 2017, Fall 2022
Systematic Theology 104, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
Womanist Theology and Critical Race Theory, Spring 2019, January 2023
RECENT COURSES
FALL 2020, FALL 2021
An introduction to systematic theology, this course studies Christian theologies of the 20th and 21st centuries including black, feminist, liberation, queer, and womanist theologies. Course readings address contemporary debates on theological problems such as the authority of revelation and scripture, radical divine transcendence, care of creation, the person and work of Jesus Christ, violence of the cross, what it means to be human, hope in the face of evil and suffering, to name a few.
FALL 2021
A study of three decades of scholarship produced by womanist theologians in the United States, this course privileges African American women's religious experience as a starting point for theological reflection. Interrogating the theological implications of race and gender, students explore what womanists have to say about biblical hermeneutics and revelation, Christology and black women's bodies, atonement and redemption, evil and sin, suffering and death, black humanity and hope.
FALL 2020
Womanist Theology and Narrative is a study of the relationship between womanist theology, black women's literary tradition and narrative theory. This course studies black women's writing as an "ethical laboratory" for womanist narrative identity that involves complexity and multiplicity rather than a linear and monolithic view of coherence and unity of the self. A womanist refiguring of black subjectivity through story challenges Western modernity's privileging of the monological self and suggests new insights for a theological anthropology. The joint venture of womanist theology and narrative theory demonstrates the radical potential of black women's narratives to operate as a mode of resistance against cultural myths and cultural codes and to render theological critique of social power.
SPRING 2022
Certain theologies conceive hope as revolutionary and prerequisite for acts of political resistance, while others view hope as motivating violent projects in colonial adventure and empire building. How is hope used as a tool of political theology? How is hope a form of cultural criticism and ideology critique? In light of the current ecological crisis and humanity's threat to its own existence, is hope only a dangerous form of denialism? Does addressing the planetary emergency entail a nihilistic fatalism? Does antiblack violence make Afropessimism a necessary political standpoint against hope? Readings address the theological relationship between hope and action, eschatology and ethics and key themes, including the apocalyptic, the messianic, alternative queer futures in religious imagination, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, and ecowomanism, as authors test the intelligibility and viability of hope in light of antiblack violence, environmental racism, our planetary emergency, and other catastrophes.
SPRING 2022
A theological treatment of the human person through a womanist lens, this course studies ways in which power, discourse, representation and productions of black subjectivity emerge in relation to the mystery of incarnation. Womanist theology insists that race, gender and sexuality shape the modern idea of the human. The question of humanity has always been a principal matter for black life. What if blackness is a heuristic for imagining the human otherwise and for probing the relationship between the human and the divine? Course readings in womanist and black feminist thought consider blackness as a resource for the theological and a vantage point for the human. The course examines how blackness sets the stage for practices of being human and confronts anew the provisional, precarious and unfinished question that is the human.