April 10, 2012 – Dr. Obery Hendricks at the Schomburg Center for Word Rapport

Dr. Obery Hendricks, professor of New Testament Studies at New York Theological Seminary, will discuss his latest book, “The Universe Bends Toward Justice: Radical Reflections on the Bible, the Church, and the Body Politic” with Marc Lamont Hill at the Schomburg Center at 7 p.m., Tuesday, April 10.  The event is free, click here for registration.

Word Rapport is a series at the Schomburg Center where the goal is to build the audience’s relationship with books and their authors.

Obery Hendricks is one of the nation’s most provocative and innovative commentators on the intersection of religion, politics and social policy in America.  A widely sought lecturer and media spokesperson, Dr. Hendricks has been featured on C-SPAN, PBS, National Public Radio, al-Jazeera Television, NHK Japan Television, Air-America, Radio One, Fox News, the Discovery Channel and the Bloomberg Network. He has been a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Democratic National Committee and the National Religious Leaders Advisory Committee of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. He is an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress and serves on the board of the Public Religion Research Institute.  Dr. Hendricks is a featured writer for Godspolitics.com, an editorial advisor to the award-winning Tikkun magazine, a contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, and a principal commentator in The Oxford Annotated Bible. The Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation calls his work “the boldest post-colonial writing ever seen in Western biblical studies.”

“Essential reading for Americans” is what The Washington Post called Dr. Hendricks’ book, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. Social critic Michael Eric Dyson describes it as “an instant classic” that “immediately thrusts Hendricks into the front ranks of American religious thinkers.” The Politics of Jesus was the featured subject of the C-SPAN program “Class, Politics and Christianity.”

A former Wall Street investment executive and past president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological seminary in the United States, Dr. Hendricks is currently Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary and Visiting Scholar in both the Department of Religion and the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. He holds the Master of Divinity with academic honors from Princeton Theological Seminary, and both the M.A. and Ph.D. in Religions of Late Antiquity from Princeton University.