Thandeka, Visiting Professor of Affective Theological Studies at Andover Newton Theological School, is author of seminal books and papers on Schleiermacher and Cultural Identity Studies, including The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to Kant’s Problem of the Empirical Self (1995), Learning to be White: Money, Race and God in America (1999, German
edition 2009), The Oxford University Handbook on Feminist Theology and Globalization (2011),
and The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher (2005).

She is also an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and congregational consultant, an Emmy award-winning television producer, and founder of contemporary affect theology as the study of how primal emotions become religious feelings. Jaak Panksepp, the founder of affective neuroscience, commends Thandeka’s “decisive historical-philosophical analysis” as work that can provide “a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experience” (The Archeology of the Mind, 391).

Polebridge Press will publish her latest book, Love Beyond Belief: Recovering the Lost Emotional Foundation of Liberal Christian Faith – An Affect Theology Project, later this year.

She was given the !Xhosa name Thandeka, which means “beloved,” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984.