Obery M. Hendricks Jr.
Obery Hendricks is one of the foremost commentators on the intersection of religion and political economy in America. He is the most widely read and perhaps the most influential African American biblical scholar writing today. Cornel West calls him “one of the last few grand prophetic intellectuals.” His lastest book, Christians Against Christianity: How the Right-Wing Has Debased the Faith is forthcoming from Little Brown.
A widely sought lecturer and media spokesperson, Dr. Hendricks’ appearances include CNN, CBS, Fox News, Fox Business News, MSNBC, the Discovery Channel, PBS, BBC, NHK Japan Television and the Bloomberg Network. He has provided major event running commentary for National Public Radio, MSNBC, and the al-Jazeera and Aspire international television networks. Dr. Hendricks has been a member of the Faith Advisory Council of the Democratic National Committee, for whom he delivered the closing benediction at the 2008 Democratic Convention; served on the National Religious Leaders Advisory Committee of the 2008 Democratic Presidential campaign and currently serves on the Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group at the U. S. Department of State. He has been an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for American Progress and serves on the board of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Dr. Hendricks is a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and Salon.com, a former editorial advisor to the award-winning Tikkun magazine, and a contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion. The Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation has called his work “the boldest post-colonial writing ever seen in Western biblical studies.”
Hendricks’ bestselling book, The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted (Doubleday), was the featured subject of the 90-minute C-SPAN special hosted by the Center for American Progress, “Class, Politics and Christianity. A past president of Payne Theological Seminary, the oldest African American theological seminary in the United States, Dr. Hendricks is currently a Senior Fellow at The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communications think tank; a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University with appointments in the Department of Religion and the Institute for Research in African American Studies; and is Emeritus Professor of Biblical Interpretation at New York Theological Seminary. An Ordained Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Hendricks 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.
