Archeologists in the last century unearthed new evidence of the origins of the Hebrew people that reshapes understandings of Israelite history and the Bible. Undoing Conquest recovers the Highland Settlements material evidence as a history that challenges the theological imagination of conquest that is still present in Christianity today. Yet this new history remains largely untold outside of specialized archeological and biblical studies contexts. Undoing Conquest analyzes this evidence from a feminist perspective in dialogue with the present moment and uncovers its importance for shaping Christian theology and church practice today. The book examines how the biblical conquest narratives shaped Christian ideology, which justified settler-colonialism and genocide around the globe like the European conquest of the Americas. It proposes ways to invite the Highland Settlements story into the life of the church by creating a new liturgical season called the Season of Origins, focused on repairing the harms of the past and creating a more just future.

Undoing Babel is the first extensive examination of the development of the Babel narrative amongst Anglo-Saxon authors from late antiquity to the eleventh century.

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery's harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges. Slavery exploited the bodies of men and women differently: enslaved women needed to be acknowledged as mothers rather than as reproducers of slave property, and enslaved men needed to claim full adult personhood without triggering white fears about their access to male privilege. Slavery's undoing became more fraught by the 1850s, moreover, as federal Fugitive Slave Law and racist medicine converged. The reach of the federal government across the borders of free states and theories about innate racial difference collapsed the distinctions between enslaved and emancipated people of African descent, making militant action necessary. Escaping to so-called "free" jurisdictions, refugees from slavery demonstrated that a person could leave the life of slavery behind. But leaving behind the enslaved body, the fleshy archive of trauma and injury, proved impossible. Bodies damaged by slavery needed urgent physical care as well as access to medical knowledge untainted by racist science. As the campaign to end slavery revealed, legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.