2014 Conference
June 5-7, 2014 | University of North Carolina | Chapel Hill, NC
Barriers to Compassion
Rev. Dr. Angela Sims, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Ethics and Black Church Studies
Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, MO
“Courageous Truth Telling: A Theological Ethical Mandate to Remember Lynching”
Dr. Angela D. Sims holds a doctorate in Christian Social Ethics from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Principal investigator for an oral history project, Remembering Lynching: Strategies of Resistance and Visions of Justice, her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Womanist Scholars Program at the Interdenominational Theological Center, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, and the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University.
Dr. Sims is the author of Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror (2010)and co-editor with Katie Geneva Cannon and Emilie M. Townes of Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (2011). A native of Louisiana, Dr. Sims is an ordained National Baptist clergywoman.
Ann Cale Kruger
Associate Professor, Educational Psychology and Special Education
Georgia State University
“Relationships in Mind”
Ann Cale Kruger is a developmental psychologist whose research investigates the functions of discourse, relationships, and thought in the development of cultural knowledge. She has published in journals such as Child Development, Social Development, Developmental Psychology, Human Nature, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Journal of Child Language, Visual Arts Research, Journal of Educational Research, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences and has presented her research at professional conferences around the world.
Dr. Kruger recently completed seven years of federally funded research investigating changes in language development and academic achievement in children who experience teaching that integrates drama into the language arts curriculum. Dr. Kruger also is a member of the research faculty in the GSU Center for Research on School Safety where she directs Project PREVENT, an intervention to promote the psychological health of Atlanta school children most at risk of commercial sexual exploitation.
Brian D. Robinette
Associate Professor
Boston College Theology Department
“Kenosis and Compassion: Contemplative Practice in a Girardian Key”
Brian D. Robinette is associate professor at Boston College, where he teaches and researches in the areas of philosophical and systematic theology. He obtained his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2003. His research interests include: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Mimetic Theory, Theological Aesthetics, Mystical Theology, and Theologies of Creation. In 2009 he published Grammars of Resurrection: A Christian Theology of Presence and Absence (New York: Crossroad/Herder), which won awards from the Catholic Press Association and the College Theology Society. He has also published several articles, including on the thought of Thomas Merton, Jean-Luc Marion, Charles Taylor, and René Girard. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts with his wife and two sons.
Experience more of Brian Robinette’s work — watch our recording of his Quarterly Speaker Series presentation on the Theology & Peace YouTube channel.
“God is revealed as the One whose self-emptying love enters into the depths of rivalry, conflict, and violence in order to overcome them — not through greater force, but through inexhaustible vulnerability.”
Brian D. Robinette, The Difference Nothing Makes