Baccalaureate Speaker:
The Rev. Dr. Mercy Amba Oduyoye
Dr. Mercy Amba Oduyoye is a professor of theology at Trinity Theological Seminary in Legon, Ghana. As a member of the faculty at Trinity, Dr. Oduyoye founded several ground-breaking initiatives. She is the founding director of the Institute of Women in Religion and Culture at Trinity Theological Seminary, and is one of the visionaries who created the Talitha Qumi Center, which houses the Institute and serves to encourage African women to arise and claim their dignity and voice as children of God. The Talitha Qumi Center has hosted a number of theologians, global leaders, and students throughout the world including a delegation of Spelman College students who traveled to Ghana, West Africa, with the Student Affairs Global Experience program.
In addition to her professorship at Trinity Theological Seminary, Dr. Oduyoye has a long history as a faculty member, lecturer, and international fellow at a number of universities throughout the United States and Africa. For 12 years, she taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. In 980, she initiated a conference of African women in theology now known as the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. She has also served on the faculty of the Maryknoll Institute of African Studies in Nairobi, Kenya, and was a visiting professor at two universities in the Netherlands.
Dr. Oduyoye has traveled extensively serving as a researcher and lecturer at a number of international institutions including the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, United Kingdom, where as the Dorothy Cadbury Fellow she lectured on “Christian Theology in Africa.” As the Ford Research Fellow and visiting lecturer in women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School, she taught a course titled “Feminist Perspectives on Christianity and Culture in Africa.” Dr. Oduyoye was twice the Luce Visiting Professor in World Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the Ann Duncan Gray Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College in Toronto, and she held the John Mackay Chair of World Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.
As a scholar and researcher, Dr. Oduyoye has authored, edited and contributed to 40 books including Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa (1986); Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (1995); The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the Church in Africa (1997); Introducing African Women’s Theology (2001); and Beads and Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa (2004). She has published more than 80 articles on theological plurality, justice-making, and the liberation of women, including an essay in the Spelman College Sisters Chapel WISDOM Center anthology titled, If I Do What Spirit Says Do: Black Women, Vocation and Community Survival.
As an internationally renowned leader, Dr. Oduyoye served for seven years as the Deputy General Secretary for the World Council of Churches, a worldwide fellowship of 349 global, regional, and sub-regional, national, and local churches seeking unity and common ground. Dr. Oduyoye completed her intermediate education at the University of London, studies in religion at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra, and earned bachelor’s and master’s of arts degrees in theology at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. In addition, Dr. Oduyoye has received honorary doctorates from a number of institutions including the Academy of Ecumenical Indian Theology, Madras and Universities of Amsterdam, Western Cape, and Yale.