Wake Forest Divinity Prof to Deliver Holy Week Sermon

Carson-Newman’s Holy Week Chapel Service will feature Dr. Veronice Miles, of Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity. The 9:30 a.m. Tuesday service will be held in Jefferson City’s First Baptist Church.

The Ruby Pardue and Shelmer D. Blackburn Assistant Professor of Homiletics and Christian Education, Miles teaches courses in Christian religious education, preaching and issues of faith among African-American women. She has combined her career in the academy and the ministry to challenge churches to become “conduits of hope as we help women, men and children give birth to life-affirming possibilities for themselves and their communities.” She is in the early stages of publishing research in a work to be titled Safe Spaces for Our Stories: Young Black Women and the Temerity to Live with Hope.

She earned the PhD in from Emory University and the MDiv from Emory’s Candler School of Theology. She holds a BA in psychology, as well as the MEd and EdS in counselor education, all from the University of Florida. She received Emory’s Bandy Preaching Fellowship, Candler’s John Owen Smith Preaching Award and Baptist Women in Ministry’s Addie Davis Preaching Award.

She has served Atlanta’s Greater Bethany Baptist Church as interim pastor, and has preached and led workshops across the country. Christians, she says, quoting the gospel of Luke, are called “to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor