About this Event
You're Invited: “Back to the Future” – A Pulpit+ Exchange Series
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.
Dr. Malaika W. McKee-Culpepper is an Assistant Professor of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership and an Assistant Professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She was a contributing member of a University of Illinois team that received the 2016 HPC Innovation Excellence Award. Hyperion Research and the HPC User Forum Steering Committee created this award to recognize noteworthy achievements by users of high-performance computing (HPC), including simulation, AI, other advanced analytics, quantum computing, and other methods and technologies.
Dr. McKee-Culpepper has published the following:
- (3-4), 141-162.
- , 409-428.
- Article a56 (ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 17-21-July-2016). Association for Computing Machinery.
- (5), 543-573.
What to Expect Each Evening:
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.
Why Attend?
Because change starts in community. This is a space to be challenged and inspired, while meeting others who share your passion for faith-rooted justice, equity, and collective liberation.
Come for one evening or all. Stay for the conversation. Leave with new energy, new insights, and a renewed sense of purpose.
RSVP now and take your seat at the table.
Whether you’re a faith leader, community builder, or someone seeking meaningful connection, this is more than a lecture series—it’s an invitation to be part of a growing network of changemakers committed to building a more just and equitable world.
Event venue & nearby stays
Iliff School of Theology, 2323 East Iliff Avenue, Denver, United States
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