Our ethos is born of struggle, sanctified by survival, and sustained by Spirit. We are scholars of the sacred and the street — interpreters of signs and sufferers, truth-tellers in the face of empire, and stewards of memory in a culture that forgets too easily.

Our ethos begins with love — not sentimental affection, but what bell hooks called “love as the practice of freedom.”Love is our first hermeneutic, our lens for reading humanity. It is the driving force that compels us to see the image of God in every face, especially in those whom society has rendered invisible.

Our ethos is grounded in truth-telling — that moral courage to name what is broken without losing sight of what can be healed. We do not hide behind neutrality. As Dr. Cornel West reminds us, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Our scholarship is not detached observation but engaged revelation.

Our ethos is sustained by hope, but not the naive optimism of comfort. Our hope is forged in the fires of protest, in the prayers of grandmothers, in the songs sung between cotton rows and jail cells. It is the hope that refuses to die, because it has seen resurrection before.

Our ethos is shaped by memory — the sacred task of remembering the forgotten. We recall the cries of the enslaved, the courage of the marchers, the brilliance of the thinkers who carved light out of darkness. We are not new; we are continuation. We walk in the lineage of Harriet, Sojourner, Douglass, Fannie Lou, Martin, Malcolm, Ella, and Audre.

Our ethos is enacted through liberative imagination — the belief that another world is not only possible but already gestating in the holy unrest of the present. We read the signs of the times not as despairing symbols of decay but as invitations to divine creativity.

Our ethos is animated by Spirit — that power which resists domestication. The Spirit blows through our scholarship as it once moved over chaos in Genesis, birthing new orders of meaning. We are Spirit-led intellectuals, Spirit-empowered organizers, Spirit-breathed interpreters of word and world.

Our ethos is fundamentally prophetic. The prophetic does not predict; it pronounces. It calls the world to account and calls the people to rise. To be prophetic is to inhabit the dangerous space between lament and liberation, where words become fire and silence becomes complicit.

Finally, our ethos is communal. We do not think in isolation; we think together. Our classrooms are circles, our pulpits are platforms for the people, our scholarship is a dialogue across generations. We believe that wisdom grows in community, that theology without the people is empty rhetoric, and that every voice — from the academy to the alley — carries a fragment of divine truth.

In sum:

Our ethos is the fusion of faith and freedom, love and logic, Spirit and scholarship.
We are interpreters of signs, architects of justice, and midwives of hope.
Our work is worship. Our research is resistance. Our preaching is prophecy.