Angela N. Parker is assistant professor of New Testament and Greek at Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology. Prior to McAfee, Dr. Parker served as assistant professor of biblical studies at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology for four years. In her research, Dr. Parker merges Womanist thought and postcolonial theory while reading biblical texts with real lived experiences of actual bodies.

A contributor to The Christian Century, Dr. Parker also serves as co-chair for the Paul and Politics Seminary of the Society of Biblical Literature and is a committee member of the American Academy of Religion’s Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities Committee. In 2018, she received the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion’s ESF New Scholar Award (2nd Place) for her article “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians.”

In her new book, If God Still Breathes, Why Can't I? Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority, Dr. Parker draws from her experience as a Womanist New Testament scholar to deconstruct one of White Christianity’s most pernicious lies: the conflation of biblical authority with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. As Dr. Parker shows, these doctrines are less about the text of the Bible itself and more about the arbiters of its interpretation—historically, White males in positions of power who have used Scripture to justify control over marginalized groups. This oppressive use of the Bible has been suffocating. To learn to breathe again, Dr. Parker says, we must “let God breathe in us.” We must read the Bible as authoritative, but not authoritarian. We must become conscious of the particularity of our identities, as we also become conscious of the particular identities of the biblical authors from whom we draw inspiration. And we must trust and remember that as long as God still breathes, we can too.