I research and write to  bring to light the knotty problems of religion and race in American history in order to foster flourishing for all people.  During seminary in the early 2000s, I first began to grapple with the concept of  race. There, I started studying the intersection of religion and race in U.S. History. This topic was not only a historical interest, but also a personal one.  I began to see how my own life–and especially my experiences as a Christian and in church–had been shaped by these unseen forces. As I learned about the history of Christianity and race and began seeking out the wisdom of brothers and sisters of color, I asked what this growing knowledge demanded of me as a Christian.

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Two answers became clear.  A door opened for doctoral studies and my husband and I moved to Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, which was predominantly African American.  There, we joined Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, an interracial church under the leadership of a Black pastor, and served our neighbors through Rock’s outreaches and the ministries of Circle Urban Ministries.  Members of Rock who had been seeking God’s justice and reconciliation for decades mentored me as I experienced the joys and trials of a poor urban community that had been shaped by the history I was studying.  They taught me to talk about race, to navigate (imperfectly) racial conversations, and to give grace because they gave it to me.  Daily, I experienced something entirely new: being a minority, which was at no time more obvious to me than my daily walks to the bus and train.  Because of this intense but nurturing context, my doctoral studies took on a new urgency.  I felt the weight of race and its history in America.  I wanted to understand that weight as much as I could, but also tell the stories of people like my friends at Rock Church, people who brought their faith to bear in positive ways on the issues of race in America.  This context influenced my first book, One in Christ: Chicago Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice.

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As it has done with so many sons and daughters, Rock Church raised me up to send me out.  I alone could not surpass one of race’s most powerful manifestations: segregated neighborhoods, whose histories I now understood intimately.  When I accepted a position in a western suburb of Chicago and soon after learned I was pregnant with our first child, my husband and I decided to move to reduce my commute time from over an hour to five minutes.  Now living again among white people in a culture that felt like home, I struggled again with calling.  The decision enabled me to be available to my (now four) children and still research and teach about the history of race and Christianity in America.  It also opened up time and provided space to invest in students as my mentors at Rock had invested in me.

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My students and calling as a teacher have further shaped my research and writing.  Teaching and simultaneously honing my own historical thinking skills has convinced me that the discipline of history develops wisdom.  When we seek to love our subjects by seeing them as fellow broken people, when we puzzle over the differences between the past and the present, and when we recognize the limits of our knowledge, we grow in wisdom.  We grow to see complexity.  We learn to suspend immediate judgment.  

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My second, co-edited book, Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History (with Dr. Jonathan Yeager), brings together some of the top teacher-scholars on religion in American history, making their expertise available for high school and college teachers.  In classrooms, religion in US history usually pops up at key moments: the Puritans, perhaps the nation’s founding, the revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries, the civil rights movement, and the rise of the religious right.  But scholars have shown how religion has influenced so many more aspects of US history.  This book helps teachers incorporate religion into key themes and events in US history and emphasizes teaching students to think historically.  I worked on it to help my own students who are training to be teachers to teach US history well.  

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My forthcoming book, Ordinary Heroes: How Studying the Past Can Help Us Move Past Racial Divides, traces the history of race and Christianity in twentieth-century America through the lenses of four Christian groups, who resisted segregationist and hierarchical racial dynamics.  The book combines careful historical study with moral reflection, helping readers learn about the past and from the past.  This book is not just about the fascinating, terrifying, and inspiring content.  Reflecting my classroom pedagogy, I focused also on how to  research and write history.  I discuss my process to show how thinking about a subject historically can foster wisdom in the present.