Rebecca A. Wilcox

Rebecca A. Wilcox (They/She) is a PhD candidate at Princeton Theological Seminary in Religion and Society. Her dissertation is entitled “Shadows of Death: Black Religion and Flights Toward Life” where she engages Black religion, political theory, political theology, and critical Black studies to explore how subjects of Black religious orientations seek coherence against the indeterminacy or opacity of blackness, by fleeing toward coherent symbolic structures of life. Wilcox examines how “flights toward life” is a religious impulse that refuses for “death to have the final say”, but leaves unexamined the ways an anti-death position in Black religion can be determined as an anti-black position insofar as blackness remains the living/socially dead on symbolic and ontological registers. She explores her concept of “flights toward life” through Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, “Sula”.

Wilcox received her Bachelor of Arts in Religion with a minor in philosophy from the historically Black university, Clark Atlanta, and a Masters of Theological Studies with a focus in Ethics from Vanderbilt University. She is from the Bronx, New York where she was raised by her mother and siblings, whose survival and determinations serve as the pulse for her commitment to religious possibilities at the intersections of critical-black-political thought.

Select Publications: