Angela N. Parker

Her Story Speaks

Dr. Angela N. Parker is a Womanist New Testament scholar and an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Greek at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology. With an M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Bible, Culture, & Hermeneutics from Chicago Theological Seminary she is a notably educated and accomplished author, speaker and theologian. However Angela Parker wasn’t just trained to be a biblical scholar; she was trained to be a White male biblical scholar. Dr. Parker’s experience of being taught to forsake her embodied identity in order to contort herself into the stifling construct of Whiteness is common among American Christians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. In her latest book, If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority, Dr. Parker draws from her perspective as a Womanist New Testament scholar. She shares how she learned to deconstruct one of White Christianity’s most pernicious lies: the conflation of biblical authority with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. In our conversation we talk about this and how historically, White males in positions of power have used Scripture to justify control over marginalized groups.