March 25, 2018 - Guest Speaker, Dr. Teresa Smallwood - Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Director of the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at Vanderbilt Divinity School will reflect on our monthly Soul Matters theme of Balance.
This April 4th will mark the 50th year since the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his final manuscript entitled Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. King establishes the existential question that I argue continues to visit us in the post-modern context. However, it is his time in the carceral state where he responds to his detractors that Dr. King articulates a counter-balance for the Movement. Dr. King sat in a jail cell in Birmingham having been arrested for protesting the imbalances of power facing blacks at that time. How we answer Dr. King’s very relevant question for our lives in the here and now depends upon how we have been arrested by the myriad ways in which life ebbs and flows for those in marginalized communities. The work of justice is sacred work. We bring the balance forward when we bring our whole selves to the work.
Rev. Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood, Esq. was born in Windsor, North Carolina. She graduated with a B.A. Degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she majored in Speech Communications and Afro-American Studies. She received the Juris Doctor Degree in 1985 from North Carolina Central University School of Law.
Dr. Smallwood began her legal career with Legal Services of the Southern Piedmont in Charlotte, NC. She also worked as a staff attorney for the Children’s Law Center in the same city. In 1989, she served as an Assistant District Attorney until she commenced her private practice that spanned more than two decades.
Dr. Smallwood currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee having graduated with the PhD degree May, 2017 from Chicago Theological Seminary with concentrations in Theology, Ethics, and Human Sciences. She now serves as Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Director of the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Dr. Smallwood was licensed and ordained to public ministry while serving Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church in Lewiston, NC. She is a member at New Covenant Christian Church in Nashville under the pastoral leadership of Rev. Dr. Judy Cummings.