Lyvonne Briggs
lyvonne.briggs@gmail.com
After I rose from slumber
This morning I spent some time in the mirror
Naked
Before I dressed for the day
Before I even brushed my teeth
And I looked
I stood
Nude
Like the pearls of an exposed collarbone
I watched
Took in every crack and crevice
More numerous than the curves
Of the River Nile
More triumphant than Lake Victoria
I noticed
Peaks and valleys
Like the Ethiopian Highlands
I realized
I have an African woman’s shape
The bosom of my ancestors
The hips of my foremothers
The calves of my forefathers
The lips of my distant cousins
The smile of my tribe
The laugh of my kin
This is the skin that God placed me in
Because I am
We are
Created in the image and likeness of God
This must be what God looks like
What God looks like
What God
Tastes
Like
I am more than your dismissive glances
I am more than your judgmental stares
I am
Created
Fearfully, wonderfully
By a God who rejoices over me with singing
And this ain’t no karaoke, y’all
This is an eternal love song
Written in the beginning
Composed just the same
A song titled with my own name
This is what it feels like
To love and to be
Totally
Freely
Chocolatey
Me.

Minister Lyvonne “Proverbs” Briggs, a New York City native, is a minister, scholar, activist, writer, and performance poet. She graduated from Seton Hall University with a Bachelor of Arts in English (Honors) and from Yale Divinity School with a MDiv. She is currently pursuing her ThM at Columbia Theological Seminary. Minister Briggs is engaged in written and spoken discourse about the intersection of religion, race, gender, and sexuality, and hopes to continue this conversation in mainstream media. At the grassroots level, she fuses spirituality and the arts (dance, poetry, and drama) to create awareness of sexual violence against girls and women among various secular and religious communities. She hopes to empower communities, especially those of faith, to play active roles in the emancipation of women from violent oppression. In the future, she wants to preach, teach, and live the liberty found only in Jesus Christ.
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Jason Craige Harris is a third-year master's candidate in Black Religion in the African Diaspora and a Marquand merit scholar at Yale Divinity School, where he was recently awarded the Mary Cady Tew Prize for exceptional ability in history and ethics. He earned a bachelor’s in religion and African-American studies from Wesleyan University and received the Giffin Prize for excellence in the Study of Religion, Spurrier Award for ethics, and an official citation for academic excellence issued by the 2009 Connecticut General Assembly. As a fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities and a recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Harris wrote a senior honors thesis analyzing theological anthropologies along political and racial fault lines in U.S. Evangelical history. His research and writing are principally concerned with black life, Christianity, (post)colonialism, violence, feminisms, critical social theory, and ultimately planetary flourishing. Concerns arising from the academic study of Africana religion, philosophy, and ethics particularly inform his inquiries. Through an interdisciplinary framework, he probes the systems of values that undergird dominant epistemological, rhetorical, cultural, and religious forms to determine to what extent, if at all, they conduce to robust conceptions of justice. With an eye toward contemporary social problems, he considers the religious strategies and visions that historically marginalized peoples have created to respond to conditions of living and being delimited by restrictive understandings of race, gender, religion, and nation. He is a general editor at the Journal of Postcolonial Networks, where, among other things, he helps to facilitate conversations on race and postcolonial/liberation theologies. As a Christian minister and budding public intellectual, Harris seeks and invites others into more holistic and attuned, less violent and constrained, ways of narrating the self and the divine.
Areas of Interest and Research:
African American Religious Studies
Africana Philosophy
African American Moral, Social, and Political Thought
African American Intellectual History
Liberation and Postcolonial (Christian) Thought
Philosophies of Liberation
Contemporary Religious Thought
Race, Gender, and American Christianities
Evangelicalisms and Pentecostalisms
Histories of Race Discourse in the Americas
(Christian) Social Ethics
Critical Social Theory/Social Philosophy
Theories of Race, Gender, and Power
Method and Theory in the Study of Religion
He is deeply committed to a praxis in which dualities of mind/heart, mind/body, and emotions/thought are consistently challenged and replaced with integrated models of selfhood that cherish self-multiplicity - the point at which the postcolonial becomes self-consciously embodied. He also enjoy taking walks in the coolness of the day, singing, laughing, and writing poetically and theoretically on his lived experience, whatever helps to bring more beauty and justice into the world.