Biography
Angela D. Sims is the thirteenth president of Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (CRCDS)—the first woman president of CRCDS and the first African American woman president to lead any Rochester-area college. A Christian social ethicist, she is the author of Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror (Baylor, 2016) and co-editor with Katie Geneva Cannon and Emilie M. Townes of Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Westminster John Knox, 2011). She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada.
Sims began her service to the AAR in 2005 as a student member of the Mid-Atlantic Region Board of Directors and a student liaison to the national organization. She has served on the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group Steering Committee; the Career Services Advisory Committee; the Theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. Group Steering Committee; an advisory member to the Critical Whiteness Studies and Religion Exploratory Session; the Moral Injury and Recovery in Religion, Society, and Culture Unit Steering Committee; the Theological Education Committee; the Finance Committee; and the Strategic Planning Team Taskforce.
Candidate Statement
I joined the American Academy of Religion in 2003 as a student and presented my first paper in 2005 at a regional and my first paper at an annual meeting in 2006. Since 2005, I have presented, convened, and / or presided at 13 of the annual meetings during my 20 years of consecutive membership. As a past member of the Womanist Approaches to the Religion and Society Steering Committee, I participated in writing the self-study document in preparation for a five-year periodic review. My primary responsibility was to document the group’s relevancy beyond our own primary targeted audience as well as to update a bibliography of publications released since 2005. At the 2016 annual meeting, I served as a reviewer for the Ethics Section. As a current member of the Finance Committee and the Strategic Planning Team Taskforce, my appreciation for AAR’s longstanding commitment to the academic study of religion is held in tension with fiscal and operational realities of our guild.
The Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study offers some insights about religious beliefs and practices as well as social and political views for the U. S. adult population overall and for specific religious traditions. As designed, it is not a comprehensive resource that reflects the global composition of the AAR. Since identity and mission matter, ongoing conversations with AAR colleagues regarding the future of our guild raise questions for me about our organization’s name, organizational structure, fiscal viability, and relevance. I am concerned how matters such as faculty models, institutional investment in faculty professional development, concerns around shared governance, and donor overreach (particularly as it relates to academic freedom) will have on the future of AAR. These concerns do not even begin to address issues that are of importance to our non-faculty members which may be of significance to shaping a future iteration of AAR.
Given current realities confronting our organization, a dominant membership revenue strain, consisting primarily of dues and annual meeting related fees, does not lend itself to supporting AAR’s mission. With a primary objective to foster excellence in the academic study of religion and enhance the public understanding of religion, we have a moment to imagine how a global cooperative association, as reflected in Board representation, might contribute to the formation of an organization to support students, scholars, practitioners, and others whose work and contributions further an academic understanding of religion in various sectors of the world. If elected to serve as your Vice President, I want to work collaboratively with others to design, implement, and evaluate the findings of a feasibility study from which to propose an organizational and governance model, while acknowledging contributions of persons from whose service we benefit, that will position our guild to live out its mission into the future.