Remembering Professor Teresia Mbari Hinga
We are saddened to announce the transition of our dear friend and colleague of many decades, Professor Teresia Mbari Hinga. A Kenyan by birth, she studied religion and English literature at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, and then went on to earn an MA in religious studies at the University of Nairobi. Teresia also earned a Ph.D. in religious studies from Lancaster University, UK, focusing on African Christianity and the place of women and gender matters in African Christianity. Her postdoctoral research explored the question of “Women, Power and Liberation in the African Independent Church.”
Teresia was privileged to serve as a lecturer and associate fellow at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP) at Harvard Divinity School from 1991 to 1992, during which she taught Professor Dianne Stewart who recently said that she considers Teresia to be one of her best teachers in graduate school. Teresia was a founding member of the “Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians,” a Pan-African association of women established by Professor Mercy Oduyoye. The Circle, in which Teresia played a major role, is concerned with the study of the role and impact of religion and culture on the lives and affairs of women in Africa. As a Catholic Theologian, she was also an active member of the Black Catholic Symposium of the American Academy of Religion. She has published numerous articles in academic journals and given many public lectures in the academy. For example, she gave the inaugural Kathleen Wicker endowed lecture at Scripps College in February 2006. Teresia was the first regional coordinator of the African Association for the Study of Religions (AASR) in the 1990s when I served as the first president of the Association.
Prior to joining Santa Clara University faculty in 2005, where she taught courses on women and religion, feminist theologies, African Religion and sociality, religion and contemporary moral issues, she worked at DePaul University in Chicago. Among her awards, she published African, Christian, and Feminist: The Enduring Search of What Matters (2017), a semi-biographical collection of essays examining Teresia’s journey from Kenya to Silicon Valley. She also published Women, Religion and HIV AIDS in Africa: Responding to Ethical and Theological Challenges (2008). Her research interests also include environmental/ ecological ethics, gender and sexual ethics, globalization, Biblical ethics, and African feminist theology.
Teresia will be remembered as a conscientious, hardworking, and affectionate scholar who gave her best to the academy, her students, and humanity. She was generous with her time and resources, a strong and indeed compassionate public intellectual. She will be sorely missed by friends and colleagues, but most especially by her two children Pauline and Anthony, her grandchildren, the Church, and the Kenyan and African community.
Respectfully submitted, Jacob K. Olupona, Harvard University
