Library & Online Resources
Dr. Jennifer T. Kaalund is associate professor of New Testament, a position she has held since 2021. She is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, where she serves as an editorial board member for the Bible Odyssey and co-chair of the steering committee for “Space, Place, and Lived Experience in Antiquity.” She is also a member of the American Academy of Religion, the North American Patristic Society, and the Catholic Biblical Association, and she is an editorial board member for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. Her numerous publications and lectures include the monograph Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the Great Migration: Diaspora, Identity, and Place (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2018), part of the Library of New Testament Studies series. She previously served as assistant professor of religious studies at Iona College, where she received the Junior Faculty Award in 2020. Kaalund received her Ph.D. in New Testament and early Christianity from The Theological School at Drew University. Her current research interests include contextual biblical hermeneutics, contemporary uses of the New Testament, and material culture.
Library Resources by Subject
Click on the links below to perform subject/author searches in the library catalog:
African Americans -- Migrations -- History
African Americans -- Religion -- History
Afrocentrism -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
Bible -- Black Interpretations
Bible. Hebrews -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Harlem (New York, N.Y.) -- Race relations.
Harlem Renaissance -- Social aspects.
Identity (Psychology) -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
Migration, Internal -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Rural-urban migration -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Select Bibliography
The links below will take you to either Bookshop.org (which supports local bookstores) or Amazon.com, where you can purchase the book.
Gates, Henry Louis and Gene Andrew Jarret, eds. The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Gregory, James N. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Kaalund, Jennifer T. Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration: Diaspora, Place and Identity. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Locke, Alain (ed.) The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. New York, Touchstone Books, 1999.
Books in Barbour Library
Print books below may be checked out by PTS students, faculty, and staff, as well as local area patrons who have library accounts (requires an annual fee). Ebooks are indicated by asterisks, and are available to current PTS students, faculty, and staff only.
For a complete list of titles, see the Display Bibliography, below.
African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures by
From ancient Persia to the Third Reich, imperial powers have built cities in their image, seeking to reflect their power and influence through a show of magnificence and a reflection of their values. Statues, pictures, temples, palacesall combine to produce the necessary justification for the wielding of power while intimidating opponents. In Power in Stone, Geoffrey Parker traces the very nature of power through history by exploring the structural symbolism of these cities. Traveling from Persepolis to Constantinople, Saint Petersburg to Beijing and Delhi, Parker considers how these structures and monuments were brought together to make the most powerful statement and how that power was wielded to the greatest advantage. He examines imperial leaders, their architects, and their engineers to create a new understanding of the relationship among buildings, design, and power. He concludes with a look at the changing nature of power in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the way this is reflected symbolically in contemporary buildings and urban plans. With illuminating images, Power in Stone is a fascinating history of some of the world’s most intriguing cities, past and present.
Call Number: BR563.N4 A38 2000ISBN: 9780826412935Publication Date: 2001-10-22
Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity by
Early Christians spoke about themselves as resident aliens, strangers, and sojourners, asserting that otherness is a fundamental part of being Christian. But why did they do so and to what ends? How did Christians' claims to foreign status situate them with respect to each other and to the larger Roman world as the new movement grew and struggled to make sense of its own boundaries? Aliens and Sojourners argues that the claim to alien status is not a transparent one. Instead, Benjamin Dunning contends, it shaped a rich, pervasive, variegated discourse of identity in early Christianity. Resident aliens and foreigners had long occupied a conflicted space of both repulsion and desire in ancient thinking. Dunning demonstrates how Christians and others in antiquity capitalized on this tension, refiguring the resident alien as being of a compelling doubleness, simultaneously marginal and potent. Early Christians, he argues, used this refiguration to render Christian identity legible, distinct, and even desirable among the vast range of social and religious identities and practices that proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean. Through close readings of ancient Christian texts such as Hebrews, 1 Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Diognetus, Dunning examines the markedly different ways that Christians used the language of their own marginality, articulating a range of options for what it means to be Christian in relation to the Roman social order. His conclusions have implications not only for the study of late antiquity but also for understanding the rhetorics of religious alienation more broadly, both in the ancient world and today.
Call Number: BT713 .D86 2009ISBN: 9780812241563Publication Date: 2009-07-14
Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration by
Bound for the Promised Land is the first extensive examination of the impact on the American religious landscape of the Great Migration--the movement from South to North and from country to city by hundreds of thousands of African Americans following World War I. In focusing on this phenomenon's religious and cultural implications, Milton C. Sernett breaks with traditional patterns of historiography that analyze the migration in terms of socioeconomic considerations. Drawing on a range of sources--interviews, government documents, church periodicals, books, pamphlets, and articles--Sernett shows how the mass migration created an institutional crisis for black religious leaders. He describes the creative tensions that resulted when the southern migrants who saw their exodus as the Second Emancipation brought their religious beliefs and practices into northern cities such as Chicago, and traces the resulting emergence of the belief that black churches ought to be more than places for "praying and preaching." Explaining how this social gospel perspective came to dominate many of the classic studies of African American religion, Bound for the Promised Land sheds new light on various components of the development of black religion, including philanthropic endeavors to "modernize" the southern black rural church. In providing a balanced and holistic understanding of black religion in post-World War I America, Bound for the Promised Land serves to reveal the challenges presently confronting this vital component of America's religious mosaic.
Call Number: BR563.N4 S474 1997ISBN: 9780822319849Publication Date: 1997-10-13
*The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader by
"Many scholars have written about the white readers and patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, but during the period many black writers, publishers, and editors worked to foster a cadre of African American readers, or in the poet Sterling Brown's words, a "reading folk." Black newspapers featured columns that reviewed the latest African American fiction. Magazines held writing contests to urge black readers to participate in the literary culture. Through newspapers, journals, and anthologies, writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Gwendolyn Bennett spoke directly to their fellow African Americans to cultivate interest in literature and the intellectual tools for reading it. In The Harlem Renaissance and the Idea of a New Negro Reader, Shawn Anthony Christian argues that print-based addresses to African Americans are a defining but understudied component of the Harlem Renaissance. Especially between 1919 and 1930, these writers promoted diverse racial representation as a characteristic of "good literature" both to exhibit black literacy and to foster black readership. Drawing on research from print culture studies, histories of racial uplift, and studies of modernism, Christian demonstrates the importance of this focus on the African American reader in influential periodicals such as The Crisis and celebrated anthologies such as The New Negro. Christian illustrates that the drive to develop and support black readers was central in the poetry, fiction, and drama of the era."-- Provided by publisher.
Call Number: ONLINEISBN: 9781613764152Publication Date: 2016
Reading Hebrews and 1 Peter with the African American Great Migration by
Kaalund examines the constructed and contested Christian-Jewish identities in Hebrews and 1 Peter through the lens of the "New Negro," a diasporic identity similarly constructed and contested during the Great Migration in the early 20th century. Like the identity "Christian," the New Negro emerged in a context marked by instability, creativity, and the need for a sense of permanence in a hostile political environment. Upon examination, both identities also show complex internal diversity and debate that disrupts any simple articulation as purely resistant (or accommodating) to its hegemonic and oppressive environment. Kaalund's investigation into the construction of the New Negro highlights this multiplicity and contends that the rhetoric of place, race, and gender were integral to these processes of inventing a way of being in the world that was seemingly not reliant on one's physical space. Putting these issues into dialogue with 1 Peter and Hebrews allows for a reading of the formation of Christian identity as similarly engaging the rhetoric of place and race in constructive and contested ways.
Call Number: BS2775.52 .K33 2019ISBN: 9780567679987Publication Date: 2018-11-29
*Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise of Hope by
Growing up in the American South, Esau McCaulley knew firsthand the ongoing struggle between despair and hope that marks the lives of some in the African American context.Reading While BlackReading While Black
Call Number: ONLINEISBN: 9780830854875Publication Date: 2020-09-01
T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology by
This handbook explores the central theme of Christian faith from various disciplinary approaches and different contexts of black experience in the United States. The central unifying theme is freedom; an important concept both in American culture and Christianity. African American theology represents a Christian understanding of God's freedom and the good news of God's call for all humankind to enter life--true human identity and moral responsibility--in genuine and just community.Contributors to the volume argue that African American theology highlights how racism and other intersecting forms of oppression complicate the human predicament; and that their eradication requires an expansion of salvation to include the liberation of persons who lack full participation in society and enjoyment of the good (and goods) made possible by that society. The essays in this handbook employ the tools of biblical criticism, history, cultural and social analysis, religious studies, philosophy, and systematic theology, in order to explore and assess the nature and impact of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, immigration, and cultural and moral pluralism in America--as well as the intersections between African American and African diasporan religious thought and life.
Call Number: BT82.7 .T25 2019ISBN: 9780567675446Publication Date: 2019-07-25
True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary by
This pioneering commentary sets biblical interpretation firmly in the context of African American experience and concern. Cutting-edge scholarship that is in tune with African American churches calls into question many of the canons of traditional biblical research and highlights the role of the Bible in African American history, accenting themes of ethnicity, class, slavery, and African heritage as these play a role in Christian scripture and the Christian odyssey of an emancipated people. Contributors include the volume editors, Thomas Hoyt, Gay L. Byron, Vincent Wimbush, and sixteen other notable scholars.
Call Number: BS2341.52 .T78 2007ISBN: 9780800634216Publication Date: 2007-05-25
The Wandering People of God: An Investigation of the Letter to the Hebrews by Call Number: BS2775.2 .K3313ISBN: 9780806621210Publication Date: 1984-01-01
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by
NATIONAL BEST SELLER * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NAMED ONE OF TIME'S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE AND ONE OF BUZZFEED'S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE "A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth."--John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times *USA Today * O: The Oprah Magazine * Publishers Weekly * Salon * Newsday *The Daily Beast In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an "unrecognized immigration" within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker * The Washington Post * The Economist * Boston Globe * San Francisco Chronicle * Chicago Tribune * Entertainment Weekly * Philadelphia Inquirer * The Guardian * The Seattle Times * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * The Christian Science Monitor
Call Number: E185.6 .W685 2010ISBN: 9780679444329Publication Date: 2010-09-07
Display Bibliography
Click the file below for a complete list of books used for a display at Barbour Library to support this event!
Articles in Barbour Library
Articles that are available online have links, and are only available to current PTS students, faculty, and staff. Articles without links are in the print journal collection.
Boone, Emilie. (2020). “Reproducing the New Negro: James Van Der Zee’s Photographic Vision in Newsprint.” American Art 34(2), 4–25.
Decock, Paul B. (2017). “Migration as a Basic Image for the Life of Faith: The Letter to the Hebrews, Philo and Origen.” Neotestamentica 51(1), 129–50.
Jones, Darryl L. (1997). “The Sermon as ‘Art’ of Resistance: A Comparative Analysis of the Rhetorics of the African-American Slave Preacher and the Preacher to the Hebrews.” Semeia 79, 11–26.
Reich, Steven A. (2009). “The Great Migration and the Literary Imagination.” Journal of the Historical Society 9(1), 87–128.
Spencer, Jon Michael. (2017). “The Black Church and the Harlem Renaissance.” African American Review 50(4), 949–56.
Wilkerson, Isabel. (2016). “The Road to Freedom.” Smithsonian 47(5), 38–102
- A Better Story (Podcast)June 25, 2019, "Negotiating Identity"
A Better Story is about seeking the sacred and holding it loosely. This podcast explores the spirituality of authors, artists and scholars, usually with a sense of levity. Guests give the audience a glimpse of the sacred: those times they were drawn toward living more vibrantly, acting more justly, seeing others more humanely - and into better stories. - Doing it Different with PTSPodcast, May 10, 2021: An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Kaalund
This limited podcast partnership with Porshanality Media explores the cutting-edge Doctor of Ministry Degree and its various programs at Pittsburgh Seminary, exploring conversations with faculty, staff, and students alike. - Enter the BiblePodcast, December 21, 2021, Is Jesus the Same as God?"
This website offers "everything you wanted to know...but were too afraid to ask" about Biblical texts, through podcasts, articles, maps, timelines, videos, and more. All content on Enter the Bible is created and/or vetted by professors at Luther Seminary, a seminary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. - Feminist Studies in ReligionBlog Post, January 15, 2021, "Roll/Role Call: Invocation, Remembrance, Lamentation, and #SayHerName"
Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc. (FSR, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization whose goal is to foster feminist studies in religion in all of its variety and diversity. FSR understands “feminist studies in religion” to encompass global critical feminist work in religious studies, theology, and spirituality both inside and outside the academy and at the grassroots level. It seeks to generate new feminist scholarship in religion that is intersectional and committed to social justice, and to create spaces for such scholarship to emerge. Founded in 1983, FSR, Inc. pioneered the development of feminist studies in religion as a field through its establishment and sponsorship of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.