Pastor • Community Organizer • Author • Speaker • Theological Ethnographer • PhD Candidate & Researcher • Husband • Father

Current Projects & RESEARCH

  • "Becoming Good": The Identity Formation of Christian Social Justice Activists In North Carolina's Moral Movement (Dissertation)
  • My research focuses on the intersections between faith, race, and social justice activism deploying social practices theories of identity and agency, critical theory, and cultural studies.
  • Strategy Team Member and Clergy Caucus Leader for Durham CAN (Congregations, Associations, and Neighborhoods) working on campaigns for affordable housing, criminal justice reform, educational equity; Metro Industrial Areas Foundation (Metro IAF) "Do Not Stand Idly By" campaign for gun safety 
  • Forthcoming Paper:  Bearing Witness to Power: Ecumenical Faith-Based Community Organizing Deployed for Public Education Reform (American Education Research Association, April 2017)
  • Forthcoming Publications
    • "How Identity Play Protects White Privilege" with Alison LaGarry in Meta-Ethnography (Oxford University Press, 2017)
    • "'I Don't Think it's Change Me; It's Helped Mold Me': The Agency of Students in a Whitestream Mentoring Organization" with Alison LaGarry in Lifting the Hood  on the Big White Bus (Edited by Carillo, Parker, and Conder; accepted 2018)

Some Prior Works

  • "Reflections on Twenty-Five Years of 'Working the Angles'" in Pastoral Work: Engagements with the Vision of Eugene Peterson (Wipf and Stock, 2014)
  • "In God's Country: Deploying Détournement to Expose the Enmeshment of Christianity with the Spectacle of Capitalism" in Détournement as Pedagogical Praxis (Sense, 2014)
  • Free for All: Reading the Bible in Community with Dan Rhodes (Baker Books, 2009)
  • "The Emerging Church/Existing Church Matrix" in The Emergent Manifesto of Hope (Baker Books, 2007)
  • The Church in Transition: The Journey of Existing Churches into the Emerging Culture (Zondervan, 2006)