Wilda C. Gafney

Wilda C. Gafney, also known as Wil Gafney, (born 1966) is an American biblical scholar and Episcopal priest who is the Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. She is specialist in womanist biblical interpretation, and topics including gender and race.

Early life and education Gafney's parents were both teachers, who divorced when she was young. She grew up attending a non-denominational church, was baptized in an African Methodist Episcopal Church, and attended a Catholic high school. She completed a Master's of Divinity from Howard University, an historically black college, in 1997. She completed a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Duke University in 2006, She was a US Army Reserve chaplain and a congregational pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, as well as a member of Dorshei Derekh, a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation in Philadelphia.

Gafney's first teaching position was in the Lutheran Theological Seminaries at Philadelphia and at Gettysburg, beginning in 2003. In 2018, she served on a committee that recommended that the U.S. Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer be changed to gender neutral language.

Gafney's research focuses on intersections between the biblical text and contemporary issues, and she has taught courses called "The Bible and Black Lives Matter", "Exodus in African American Exegesis", and "The Bible in the Public Square". She is on the editorial team for the Journal of Biblical Literature. In June 2018, in response to Jeff Sessions quoting Romans 13 to defend President Donald Trump's policy of separating children from their parents at the border, Gafney wrote an article for Religion Dispatches titled "If We Did Use the Bible to Run the Country...." In September 2020, Gafney participated in "Scholar Strike", an initiative inspired by the strikes by athletes to call attention to racial injustice in the US. Gafney posted a video to the Scholar Strike YouTube page titled "White Supremacy in Biblical Interpretation." After many journalists called January 6, 2021, a "dark day", Gafney responded, "Today was not a 'dark day'. Today was a white day. One of the whitest days in American history."

Awards and honors In 2019, the Union of Black Episcopalians presented Gafney with the Anna Julia Haywood Cooper Honor Award for her scholarship and advocacy on matters of race and gender. In 2020, the Society of Biblical Literature named her one of the first two recipients of its Outstanding Mentor Award.

Selected publications Books

Chapters and articles