Andrea C. White
Associate Professor of Theology & Culture
CONTACT
3041 Broadway, AD 420
New York, NY 10027
212-280-1363
[email protected]
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. Her teaching and research fashion a nexus between womanist theology, black critical theory, and phenomenology.
Her forthcoming publication, Scandal of Flesh: Black Women’s Bodies, God and Politics, is under review with the Religion and Critical Thought book series with Cambridge University Press. She has several book projects underway, including Fissures of Hope (Cambridge Elements in Christian Doctrine, a series with Cambridge University Press), Mundane Enchantments and Everyday Religion, co-authored with Federico Settler and Trygve Wyller (Routledge) and co-edited volumes, State of Black Theology (Routledge) and Barth and the Political. She is also the author of an unpublished volume, Back of God: Theology of Otherness in Karl Barth and Paul Ricoeur. She is the founding co-editor of the online journal Black Theology Papers Project. She lectures and preaches across the United States, will lead a fellowship in Germany and Poland, and her international lectureships have taken her to Brazil, Canada, Denmark, England, India, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland.
Dr. White has served as Faculty Chair of the Columbia University Senate’s Commission on Diversity, Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and Chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Black Theology program unit. She sits on editorial boards for several journals in the field of religion, including Journal for the American Academy of Religion. She also sits on advisory boards for several theological societies, including the Karl Barth Society of North America. She was a founding member of The Carter Center’s Scholars in Action, a forum created to address gender violence against women and girls. She served as faculty leader for the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion for early-career scholars. She is also a faculty leader for Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.
Before arriving at Union in 2015, Dr. White served on the faculty at Candler School of Theology and in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is a recipient of Emory’s Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award. She was awarded two research grants, the Lilly Theological Research Faculty Fellowship from The Association of Theological Schools and The Louisville Institute Book Grant. She was also awarded a dissertation fellowship by the Forum for Theological Exploration (formerly Fund for Theological Education).
Dr. White holds a PhD in theology from The University of Chicago Divinity School, a Master of Divinity with a concentration in philosophy of religion from Yale Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts with honors in philosophy from Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Dr. White has been an ordained American Baptist minister for over twenty-five years and serves as Theologian-in-Residence at The Riverside Church in the City of New York and on the Ordination Council of American Baptist Churches of Metro New York. Before her academic posts, she served as pastor of Aldrich Baptist Church in North Franklin, NY, hospice chaplain for Catskill Area Hospice, and chaplain at Springbrook in Oneonta, NY, a residential school for children and adults with developmental disabilities. During graduate school, she served as Minister of Adult Christian Education at The University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Dr. White is a proud native New Yorker and a violinist.
COURSES
Otherness of God
Phenomenology of Violence
Phenomenology of the Body
Political Theology
Politics of Hope
Systematic Theology
Womanist Theology and Black Theology
Womanist Theology and Critical Race Theory
Womanist Theology and the Arts
The Politics of Hope with Rev. Dr. Andrea White
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.
This course considers black women's artistic expression as theological utterance and explores the aesthetic imaginary in black thought. Through the intersection of womanist theology and theological aesthetics, course material engages creative works of black women as both counter movement to antiblackness and black death and as sites for wonder and grace. Exceeding practices of resistance and struggle, black art is an occasion for worldmaking.
This course provides an introduction to womanist and black theologies through a study of five decades of scholarship. Womanist theologians and scholars of black theology are presented as interlocutors on four major topics: 1) biblical revelation and biblical hermeneutics; 2) the cross and redemption (Christology, soteriology, evil, sin and suffering); 3) genealogies of race and the co-constitutive relation between race and theology; 4) theologies of embodiment, theological anthropology and gender violence. In honor of their legacies, the course features readings of James H. Cone and Delores Williams and concludes with interpretations of their work by preeminent scholars now leading the field. Formerly ST 374.