Join us for Iliff’s Pulpit+ Exchange Series, an inspiring series of in-person and virtual gatherings where clergy, lay leaders, activists, scholars, ministers, journalists, and community organizers come together to wrestle with the most pressing questions of our time. Together, we’ll explore powerful stories of hope, healing, and action—each rooted in a shared vision of justice and liberation.

Moqueca as Welcome Table Theology: Extending Dr. Rachel Harding’s Vision Toward an Oceanic Commons

In There Is a River, Dr. Vincent Harding set out to offer a “rigorous analysis of the long black movement toward justice, equity and truth,” while giving himself permission to celebrate it. He called that movement a river, and the Harding and Freeney family has long been a confluence within it.

The family’s charge was teaching, scholarship, theology, and the arts. Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Harding took up all four and added a fifth: nourishment of the soul, mind, and body. A poet and scholar of Afro-Atlantic religions, she carried the river farther south, to Salvador, Bahia, where her study of Candomblé, A Refuge in Thunder, showed how enslaved and freed Africans made spaces of refuge and belonging. With her mother, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, she wrote in Remnants of the hospitality at the foundation of their family’s spirituality. From this work came her idea of a “welcome table”: a confluence of practices long known to carry the work of social justice, resting on critical scholarship in liberation theology and emerging understandings of the political status of Blackness. Those who knew her also tasted the idea. She could quiet a room with a pot of moqueca, the Bahian seafood stew she served to friends, students, and elders alike.

In this talk, Dr. Malaika McKee gives Rachel’s vision formal language as welcome table theology and carries her recipe out to sea as social justice scholarship and praxis. She argues that the scholarship and the stew are one work, and that the oceans, which supply its ingredients, are humanity’s shared welcome table: the meeting point where something as simple as hospitality asks hard questions about equity, fairness, social justice, and planetary safety. Who is served first? Is there still enough in the pot? What happens when the table is depleted? This is a liberation theology grounded in the theory of the commons and practiced at the tables where we meet to create justice.

Expect an evening of story, scholarship, and remembrance, followed by open dialogue. Scholars, practitioners, and all who knew a Harding table are welcome.

Details:

Friday, October 30

5:00 – 5:45 PM (MST): Light meal and connection

5:45 PM: Lecture begins, followed by Q&A and deep discussion

Location: In-person at Iliff or online via livestream. Unable to attend in person? Register to receive the livestream link.