Life Under the Baobab Tree

Kenneth Ngwa is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew Theological School. Ngwa’s current research interests are in the fields of African/a biblical hermeneutics. He is also the founder and director of the Religion and Global Health Forum at Drew Theological School, an interdisciplinary forum that examines the relation between religion and health, healthy disparities, and collaborative work for health equity. Ngwa is the author of The Hermeneutics of the ‘Happy’ Ending in Job 42:7–17 (2005); co-editor of Navigating African Biblical Hermeneutics: Trends and Themes from Our Pots and Calabashes (2018); and Let My People Live: An Africana Reading of Exodus (2022).

Aliou Cissé Niang is an associate professor of biblical interpretation―New Testament―at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Niang is the author of Faith and Freedom in Galatia and Senegal (2009); co-author of Text, Image, and Christians in the Graeco-Roman World (2012); A Poetics of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: God, Human-Nature Relationship, and Negritude (Cascade Books, 2019); “Catholic Epistles,” in Anselm Companion to the New Testament (Anselm Academic, 2014); “Space and Human Agency in the Making of the Story of Gershom through a Senegalese Christian Lens,” Forum-Journal of Biblical Literature (2015); “Islandedness, Translation, and Creolization,” in Islands, Islanders, and Bible: RumInations (2015); “Christianity in Senegal,” and “Diola Religion,” both in Encyclopedia of Christianity in the Global South, ed. Mark A. Lamport and Philip Jenkins (2018).

Arthur Pressley is an associate professor of psychology and religion at Drew University, where he has also served as academic dean. Pressley is also a clinical psychologist, a past president of the New Jersey Association of Black Psychologists and has worked on numerous international issues, most notably the Childhood Chernobyl Childhood Illness Project. He currently teaches a course titled “Fanon and Psychoanalysis of Black Novels.” Some of his published articles include “Using Novels of Resistance to Teach Intercultural Analysis and Empathy”; “Teaching Black: God Talk and Black Thinkers,” in Being Black, Teaching Black: Politics and Pedagogy in Religious Studies, ed. Nancy Lynne Westfield (2007), and “The Story of Nimrod: A Struggle with Otherness and the Search for Identity,” in African American Religious Life and the Story of Nimrod, ed. Anthony Pinn and Allen Dwight Callahan (2008).

Shola Adegbite is a PhD candidate at Union Theological Seminary, NY. She engages the Bible using storytelling as well as her Yoruba-African background and socio-historical and ideology criticisms. She also has interests in gender, embodied, and earth-centered approaches with a goal of liberation, justice, healing, and diversity. She is a teaching fellow for introductory level classes on the Bible, New Testament, and church history.

An Yountae is an associate professor of religious studies at California State University, Northridge. Dr. An specializes in religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin America and the Caribbean. His research focuses on the construction of religion, race, and political identity in colonial and postcolonial Americas. He is author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016), and The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making (forthcoming 2023, Duke University Press). He is co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021).