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The Rev. Dr. AnneMarie Mingo is associate professor of ethics, culture, and moral leadership, and director of the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, positions she has held since 2022.
She is a member of the American Academy of Religion, where she serves on the steering committee for Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society. She is also a member of the Society of Christian Ethics.
Dr. Mingo has written articles for many publications, including Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, v Journal of Religious Ethics, and Black Theology: An International Journal. She is also a book series editor for T&T Clark Studies in Social Ethics, Ethnography, and Theologies. Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Imagination in the Civil Rights Movement is her first monograph.
Dr. Mingo received her M.Div. at Princeton Theological Seminary, where in 2006 she received the Jean Anne Swope and James L. Mechem Prize in Christian Ethics. She received her Ph.D. in Religion: Ethics and Society from Emory University, and is an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted 
systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. In Have You Got Good Religion? Black Women's Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement (Univ. of Illinois, 2024) Dr. Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created. These women acted out of belief that what they did was bigger than themselves. Taking as their goal nothing less than the moral transformation of American society, they joined the movement because it was something they had to do. Their personal accounts of a lived religion enacted in the world provide powerful insights into how faith steels human beings to face threats, jail, violence, and seemingly implacable hatred. Throughout, Mingo draws on their experiences to construct an ethical model meant to guide contemporary activists in the ongoing pursuit of justice.
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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.
Gattison, Annette Madlock, ed. Womanist Ethical Rhetoric : A Call for Liberation and Social Justice in Turbulent Times. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021.
Rose, Sylvia. Rise Up : A Call to Leadership for African American Women. Downer's Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2004.
Williams, Shannon D. Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
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.
Chosen Vessels : women of color, keys to change by
"African American woman." The phrase conjures up a variety of images: Sassy career women. Wise church women. Strong grandmothers. Welfare mothers. But how about "chosen vessels"? Or "keys to change"? Perhaps we need some new images. Women of color have historically been on the bottom of the economic and social ladder. But the paradox of the kingdom of God is that being on the bottom is a plus. God often chooses the rejected and despised to confound the wise and mighty (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). By examining our spiritual history and God-ordained destiny, Rebecca Florence Osaigbovo helps us turn the tide of evil in our own lives and the lives of our families, cities and nations. We are chosen vessels. Here is the help we need to find--and live--our significance in the eyes of God.
Call Number: BR563.B53 O83 2002ISBN: 9780830823802Publication Date: 2002-07-10
Have You Got Good Religion?: Black women's faith, courage, and moral leadership in the Civil Rights Movement by
What compels a person to risk her life to change deeply rooted systems of injustice in ways that may not benefit her? The thousands of Black Churchwomen who took part in civil rights protests drew on faith, courage, and moral imagination to acquire the lived experiences at the heart of the answers to that question. AnneMarie Mingo brings these forgotten witnesses into the historical narrative to explore the moral and ethical world of a generation of Black Churchwomen and the extraordinary liberation theology they created. These women acted out of belief that what they did was bigger than themselves. Taking as their goal nothing less than the moral transformation of American society, they joined the movement because it was something they had to do. Their personal accounts of a lived religion enacted in the world provide powerful insights into how faith steels human beings to face threats, jail, violence, and seemingly implacable hatred. Throughout, Mingo draws on their experiences to construct an ethical model meant to guide contemporary activists in the ongoing pursuit of justice. A depiction of moral imagination that resonates today, Have You Got Good Religion? reveals how Black Churchwomen's understanding of God became action and transformed a nation.
ISBN: 9780252087769Publication Date: 2024-03-26
In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness by Call Number: BR563.N4 T68 1995ISBN: 0687187575Publication Date: 1995-02-01
Jesus, Jobs, and Justice : African American women and religion by
This groundbreaking book begins with slavery and gives us a remarkable account of the religious faith, social and political activism, and extraordinary resilience of black women during the centuries of American growth and change. Collier-Thomas makes clear that while religion has been a guiding force in the lives of most African Americans, for black women it has been essential. As co-creators of churches, black women were a central factor in their development. Collier-Thomas explores the ways in which women had to cope with sexism in black churches as well as racism in mostly white denominations in their efforts to create missionary societies and form women's conventions; and how, within the church, men treated women as second-class citizens despite their importance to the very existence and survival of the church itself. African American churchwomen created national organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women and the National Council of Negro Women, they confronted racism in white-led quasi Christian groups such as the YWCA, and they worked in male-dominated organizations such as the NAACP and National Urban League, to demand civil rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities, and to protest lynching, segregation, and discrimination. Jesus, Jobs, and Justice restores black women to their rightful place in American history, elucidating both the quality and consequence of their faith in themselves, their race, and their God.
Call Number: BR563.B53 C644 2010ISBN: 9781400044207Publication Date: 2010-02-02
Witnessing and Testifying : Black women, religion, and civil rights by
After a chapter exploring black women's religious context and presenting early examples of this work by women of the ante-bellum and post-Reconstruction eras, Ross looks at seven civil rights activists who continue this tradition. They are Ella Josephine Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Way DeLee, Clara Muhammad, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson. In a fascinating narrative style that draws on biography, social history, and original archival research, Ross shows how their moral formation and work reflect both womanist consciousness and practices of witness and testimony, both emergent from the black religious context. Ross' major work is engrossing history and moving ethical challenge. Examining black women's civil rights activism as religiously impelled moral practices brings a new insight to work on the movement and lifts up a paradigm for engagement in the mountainous challenges of contemporary social life.
Call Number: BR563.B53 R67 2003ISBN: 9780800636036Publication Date: 2003-01-09
Click on the links below to perform subject/author searches in the library catalog:
African American women -- Religious life.
African American women -- Civil rights.
Select Bibliography
The articles below without links are not available in the Barbour Library journal collection - please check your local library for interlibrary loan services in order to obtain copies of these.
Duran, Jane. “Frances Harper: A Christian Voice for the Nineteenth Century.” Philosophy & Theology 30, no. 1 (2018): 79–90.
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.
Crawford, Vicki. “‘Be Ye Doers of the Word, Not Just Hearers Only’: Faith and Politics in the Life of Victoria Gray Adams.” Cross Currents 57, no. 2 (Sum 2007): 170–79
Dewart Bell, Janet. “Lighting the Fires of Freedom.” Nation 306, no. 15 (May 21, 2018): 18–21.
Pruitt, Nicholas T, and T Laine Scales. “‘We Want to Help You to Help Us’: Southern Baptist and National Baptist Women and Race Relations during the 1930s and 1940s.” American Baptist Quarterly 38, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 304–29.
Schueneman, Mary K. “A Leavening Force: African American Women and Christian Mission in the Civil Rights Era.” Church History 81, no. 4 (December 2012): 873–902.
Smoot, Pamela A. “African American Baptist Women: Making a Way out of No Way.” Baptist History and Heritage 42, no. 3 (Sum 2007): 19–33.
- Interfaith AllianceInterfaith Alliance was founded in 1994 in the midst of growing entanglement between religion and politics. In the quarter-century since, we have stood as a leader in defense of true religious freedom.
- Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference Inc.The mission of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. (SDPC) is to nurture, sustain, and mobilize the African American faith community in collaboration with civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders to address critical needs of human rights and social justice within local, national, and global communities. SDPC seeks to strengthen the individual and collective capacity of thought leaders and activists in the church, academy, and community through education, advocacy, and activism.
- Schomberg Center for Research in Black CultureThe Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, one of The New York Public Library’s renowned research libraries, is a world-leading cultural institution devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences.
- Society of Christian EthicsThe purpose of the Society is to promote scholarly work in Christian ethics and in the relation of Christian ethics to other traditions of ethics, and to social, economic, political and cultural problems; to encourage and improve the teaching of these fields in colleges, universities and theological schools; and to provide a community of discourse and debate for those engaged professionally within these general fields.
- Society for the Study of Black Religion CollectionThe Society for the Study of Black Religion (SSBR) is the oldest scholarly society dedicated to the study and production of knowledge about the broad diaspora of Black religion. A digital collection of AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library.
- Display Bibliography: Have You Got Good Religion?A curated list of print and media resources from the collection of Barbour Library