Princeton Theological Seminary

Graduate Student, History

Thesis Title: The Politics of Public Confession in the East African Revival

About

Doctoral candidate, Princeton Theological Seminary (anticipated 2013)

M.T.S., Weston Jesuit School of Theology (2008)

B.A., Gardner-Webb University (2005)

I am a student of religious history with a particular interest in the history of Christian missions and the growth of Christianity in Africa and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries. I am intrigued by religious and cultural exchanges between European missionaries and those who converted, with a focus upon reciprocity and the agency of non-Westerners. Related research areas include the history of sport, the history of the Bible in the non-Western world, religion and masculinity, and evangelicalism.

My dissertation focuses upon the phenomenon of public confession in the East African Revival, a Christian movement that emerged in the early 1930s and spread through Ruanda-Burundi, the Congo, Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda, and southern Sudan. While the revival has often been viewed as the result of European missionary activity, I argue that looking at the controversial aspect of public confession within the revival offers important insights into the ways that African Christians developed a distinctly African movement. Through public confession East African Christians articulated spiritual anxieties, described moral crises facing their communities, and cast their vision for a new world.