VDS has a legacy of racial and gender justice work stretching back to the nascent Civil Rights Movement, but VDS and Vanderbilt University have made mistakes along the way. VU expelled civil rights nonviolent leader and Divinity student James Lawson, students protested in front of Kirkland Hall, and many VDS faculty resigned in protest. How does an institution with such a mixed history of opposing the values we hold dear become one that is home to the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements and the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative, guided by the living Purposes and Commitments?
Join Dr. Phillis Sheppard, director of the Lawson Institute, Dr. Teresa Smallwood, associate director of the Collaborative, and MDiv/ThM graduate Damien Pascal Domenack for a conversation about repairing wrongs through concrete actions and relationships, and how students at VDS are formed for leadership in the context of ongoing commitments to racial and gender justice.
Panelists:
Damien Pascal Domenack is a Peruvian immigrant raised in Southern California. Damien is a Santero Priest and a candidate for ordination in the Unitarian Universalist tradition whose ministry centers Queer, Transgender, Black, and Brown immigrant communities of which he is a part. His research focuses on critically investigating the ways in which Afro-diasporic spirituality, and Christianity in particular, encounter the identity and community-shaping forces of the flesh for LGBTQI+ —especially transgender and non-binary—persons of color. Damien approaches the work of theology and social ethics by weaving interdisciplinary Black Atlantic religion work with decolonial and liberative theology, with its focus on lived religion as a site from which to theologize and investigate how religion is lived in community. His work aims to shift and illuminate the ways memory, story, and relationality contour religious identities.
Dr. Phillis Isabella Sheppard is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Associate Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture and director of the James Lawson Institute at Vanderbilt University. Her research engages the intersection where the social and the intrapsychic meet. Her current book,
Tilling Sacred Ground: Interiority, Black Women, and Religious Experience, (Rowman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2021), turns
to the lived religious experiences, expressed in, but well beyond, the “official” religious sites, of black women. As a practical theologian, Dr. Sheppard is recognized for her contributions to practical theology, psychology and religion, womanist methodology, cultural studies, pastoral theology, and spiritual practices.
Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood, Esq. is the associate director of the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at Vanderbilt Divinity School and will soon be the James Franklin Kelly and Hope Eyster Kelly Associate Professor of Public Theology at United Lutheran Seminary. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for undergraduate studies where she majored in Speech Communications and Afro-American Studies and graduated with a B.A. Degree. She received the Juris Doctor Degree in 1985 from North Carolina Central University School of Law. Dr. Smallwood graduated with the PhD degree May, 2017 from Chicago Theological Seminary in the areas of Theology, Ethics, and Human Sciences. She was licensed and ordained to public ministry while serving Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church in Lewiston, NC.
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