Over the course of this coming fall, you will see new faces join the “Bench.” We’re in a recruiting season, as we augment our stellar team of regular contributors. In anticipation for his first post tomorrow, I’d like to formally welcome the Reverend Doctor Malcolm Foley to our team at the Anxious Bench.
Though I have had the pleasure of being acquainted with Malcolm online for a number of years and collaborating with him for virtual events with The Conference on Faith and History, our first in-person meeting was this past spring. Our encounter coincided with the Annual Noll lecture at Wheaton College, of which Malcolm was given the prestigious honor of delivering a lecture adapted from his dissertation on Black Protestants in the age of lynching. As part of the team that hosted Malcolm, I joined him, among other faculty colleagues at Wheaton, for a delightful evening of conversation and delicious cuisine. Malcolm has a brilliantly attuned historical mind and a pastoral heart. His lecture that evening reimagined for me what it looks like for an activist historian to present historical ideas in the mode of logic on fire.
Foley serves as the Special Advisor to the President of Baylor University for Equity and Campus Engagement, as well as the director of the Black Church Studies Program at Truett Theological Seminary. He is also a pastor at Mosaic Waco, an intentionally multi-cultural, non-denominational church in Waco, TX. He is a husband and father.
Foley holds an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School focusing on the theology of the early and medieval church and a Ph.D. in Religion (Historical Studies) from Baylor University. His dissertation, “Ought We Kiss the Hand That Smites Us?: Black Protestants in the Age of Lynching, 1890-1919” investigates African American Protestant responses to lynching from the late 19thcentury to the early 20th century. His current work revolves around racial violence both past and present and seeks to broadly address how communities can resist the violence inherent to racial capitalism. He has contributed to Christianity Today, Mere Orthodoxy, and other outlets.
Please welcome Malcolm to the Anxious Bench and follow @MalcolmBFoley on Twitter, if you have not already done so. I have just reviewed and edited his first post, which runs tomorrow—“But What Do I Do?”: On Race and Political Economy. It is a fine inaugural contribution by my colleague. Get ready to read this one and other outstanding contributions from him, beginning tomorrow.
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