The 2026 Antoinette Brown Lecture delivered by Keri Day, Ph.D.

Drawing on black women’s religious cultures, Day suggests that early twentieth century black religious practices of spirit power facilitated wonder, which had epistemic and social implications with respect to legacies of slavery and antiblackness, leading to spiritual outcomes such as self-fashioning and self-possession for black communities, outcomes not necessarily measured or captured by modern ideas of political liberation (that tend to be indexed to the state). This lecture foregrounds spirit power and its outcomes such as wonder, self-fashioning and self-possession as equally important black religious responses to white fascism and authoritarianism, spiritual outcomes that black feminist discourses have amplified over the last two decades. In our current authoritarian political moment, having a capacious, diverse sense of how black communities are religiously responding to fascist regimes matters. Moreover, black religious practices of spirit power offer a way to think about the epistemic and social effects of wonder, which raise questions around the purposes and ends of black religion and Christian theology more broadly.

Keri Day is the Elmer G. Homrighausen Chair & Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religion at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, NJ. She also has an honorary appointment as Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa. In 2023, she was the first African American woman to be promoted to full professor in the 212-year history at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned a B.S. in Political Science and Economics from Tennessee State University, an M.A. in Religion and Ethics from Yale University Divinity School, and her Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University. Her teaching and research interests are in womanist/feminist theologies, social critical theory, cultural studies, economics, and Afro-Pentecostalism. She has authored four academic books, Unfinished Business: Black Women, The Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America (2012); Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives (2015); Notes of a Native Daughter: Testifying in Theological Education (2021); and her most recent book, Azusa Reimagined: A Radical Vision of Religious and Democratic Belonging, (2022). She has been recognized by NBC News as one of six black women at the center of gravity in theological education in America.

She has previously served as the chair of the theology department at Princeton. She currently serves as a board member for the American Academy of Religion, which is the largest scholarly society dedicated to the academic study of religion, with more than 6,000 members around the world. She has previously served as a series editor for Cambridge University Press (Religion and Critical Reflection series) and currently is an editorial board member for the Journal of World Christianity.

Alongside her scholarship, she also engages public policy leaders. She is an advisory board member for theologies of children’s well being at the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). She has participated in White House briefings in Washington D.C. to discuss issues related to economic policy, religious freedom, and faith-based initiatives. She has also written for the New York Daily News, The Christian Century, The Feminist Wire, and The Huffington Post.

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