FTE 70th Anniversary Celebration

Rev. Tyler Sit is the founding pastor of New City Church, a church in Minneapolis that is led mostly by queer people of color. New City became the first 'built from scratch' church plant to charter in Minnesota United Methodism in decades. And in 2022, New City launched its second branch, Northeast United Methodist Church. Sit is a second-generation Chinese American, and he focuses his racial justice work into Intersect, a church planting network that he co-founded during the pandemic. Sit has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Minnesota Public Radio, and more.

E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair
University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society
Vanderbilt University Divinity School
University Distinguished Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies
College of Arts and Science, Vanderbilt University

Dr. Emilie M. Townes, an American Baptist clergywoman, is a native of Durham, North Carolina. She holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Religion in Society and Personality from Northwestern University. Dr. Townes is the Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society (Divinity) and University Distinguished Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies (College of Arts and Science) at Vanderbilt University, becoming the first African American to serve as Dean of the Divinity School in 2013. She is the former Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale University Divinity School and in the fall of 2005, she was the first African American woman elected to the presidential line of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and served as president in 2008. She was the first African American and first woman to serve as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Yale Divinity School. She is the former Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Social Ethics at Saint Paul School of Theology. Editor of two collection of essays, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering and Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation; she has also authored Womanist Ethics, Womanist Hope, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care, and her groundbreaking book, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. She is co-editor with Stephanie Y. Mitchem of the Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life and co-editor with the late Katie Geneva Cannon and Angela Sims for the Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader done with was published in November 2011. Her most recent co-editorship is with Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Alison Gise Johnson, and Angela Sims for Walking Through the Valley: Essays: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon (2022). Townes was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She was the first Black woman to serve as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2008 and served a four-year term as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012 to 2016. In 2022, Townes was elected to the presidential line of the Society of Christian Ethics. Her presidential year will be 2024-2025. At that time, she will be the first Black woman to hold this office. (she, her, hers)

Renee K. Harrison is a tenured Associate Professor of African American and US Religious History at Howard University. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion from Emory University (Atlanta, GA) with an interdisciplinary focus on History, Philosophy, African American Studies, and Black Feminist/Womanist Thought.

Dr. Harrison is currently the historian in residence for Join the Movement Toward Racial Justice Campaign and is involved in history projects in Washington, DC. Her recent publication, Black Hands, White House: Slave Labor and the Making of America (Fortress Press, November 2021), documents and appraises the role enslaved women, men, and children played in building the US and its physical and fiscal infrastructure. Given the enslaved community’s contribution to the US, Black Hands, White House questions the absence of memorials (e.g., stand-alone monuments) on the National Mall that honor enslaved Black laborers. Dr. Harrison is also the author of Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum American (2009) and Engaged Teaching in Theology and Religion (co-authored with Jennie Knight (2015).

A native of Los Angeles, California, Dr. Harrison is a retired 11-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the former executive director of A Leap of Faith Productions, a non-profit community-based theatre group in Los Angeles. She is an artist, poet, and playwright whose greatest love is teaching and honoring the work and labors of the ancestors. She also enjoys spending her spare time traveling with her spouse, Yolonda, and pup, Satchmo.