Alumni Profiles Series: Rodney S. Sadler, Jr.

Reverend Dr. Rodney S. Sadler, Jr. earned his Ph.D. in religion, specializing in Hebrew Bible and biblical archaeology, from Duke University in 2001 and has taught at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, for twenty-four years, where he is Professor of Bible and director of the Center for Social Justice and Reconciliation. He is the author of “Can a Cushite Change His Skin?: An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Othering in the Hebrew Bible” and co-author, with Duke alum Emerson B. Powery, of The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved. In March 2026, he won the Democratic primary for North Carolina House District 106.

Was there a particular moment that shaped your professional direction?

I grew up a traditional Baptist out of Philadelphia—very deeply dedicated to an evangelical path. One of the most significant, formative moments for me was the four years I spent at Moorestown Friends, a Quaker institution, for high school. It really gave me a different sense of what God was calling us to do, and the way that God speaks to us to do justice and moves us in different ways. Coming out of Moorestown Friends, going to Howard University, that call for justice was amplified through so many of the classes I took on campus—focusing on Black psychology, sitting at the feet of people who had worked in the White House, people delving into African theology, Black theology, Black philosophy. All those things kept pushing me to see: the work that you do in this world cannot just be for yourself but must be for our larger community that has been systematically disenfranchised over the years.

How did professors shape the direction of your scholarship?

Gene Rice and Cain Hope Felder really did. Gene showed me that I needed to go into Hebrew Bible and do work in this area. When I got to work with Cain on the founding of the Biblical Institute for Social Change—just sitting with the name: the Biblical Institute for Social Change was profoundly impactful. The Bible can be a tool that is socially transformative. It can bring about the kinds of shifts that we’d like to see in community. And that hit me hard, right in my heart, and that made me really think about [important questions]: how do we engage with scripture in ways that help with the larger liberative efforts of African American people, the larger justice work in the world for Black, Brown, and impoverished people?

When I got into Duke, I went in as an archaeology student and really wanted to learn about the people in the Bible. At the time I was very much interested in [the question], were these people of color? I think that was a question answered early on. Doing a couple of digs in Israel/ Palestine and studying at Hebrew University—the indigenous people looked a whole lot more like us than they look like the people depicted on the pages of Scripture. But then I kept saying—no, that’s not the end point of my scholarship. This project is supposed to open a different understanding of humanity, of the way we relate to each other, of what Scripture is all about.

How has the Moral Monday movement shaped your decision to run for office?

In 2013, the Moral Monday movement kicked off here in North Carolina—and that was instrumental in shifting a lot of the ways I thought about what I did, from trying to write for the academy to [thinking about] how I speak to the larger community and to utilizing a biblical framework to do so. May 6, 2013, was the first time I had ever participated in an act of civil disobedience—joining 29 others at the North Carolina General Assembly as part of the second week of the movement.  We sang songs, prayed prayers, sought to live up to our constitutionally authorized right to “inform” our legislators about how they should vote on crucial issues for working people...and were then for that arrested. I came home that night and wrote what I thought of as my own attempt at a “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail,” calling on ministers across North Carolina to get involved in the struggle—and to use scripture as a framework for why. Scripture became for me a framework for forming a “more perfect union” in N.C. And gave us a pathway to achieve it.

Last year, when I felt called—through God and through others—to think seriously about running for office, it seemed like the natural next step. I’ve been fighting these folks on the outside for thirteen years through the Moral Movement, the New Poor People’s Campaign, and with other healthcare, housing, and climate/environmental justice groups. Maybe it’s time to see what we might do from the inside.

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What advice would you offer to current doctoral students?

If I were talking to a brand-new student, the first thing I’d say is to have a concept of what you’d like to write, and then choreograph all of your classes so you have an elaborate dance that moves you in that direction. Every class should lead you in that direction toward your ultimate goal.

Dream big. Don’t write a dissertation that someone else wants you to write. There’s a line people attribute to Howard Thurman that I will paraphrase: instead of asking what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and then do that thing. What the world most needs is people who have come alive! If you like the work, it is no longer work. It’s a joy to do the research, a joy to engage in thought and reflection about the work.

Read outside of the traditional classics of the field. What do you get by reading Wil Gafney‘s Womanist hermeneutics? What do you get by considering research from someone working on mass incarceration alongside a post-colonial biblical reading? Allow yourself to be influenced by others’ voices and others’ perspectives and their methodologies and theories and let those encountered ideas erode your rough edges [and] make you more well-rounded. Join the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL). Get into the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) as soon as you can—they connect you with mentors and people in the publishing world who will walk you through how to put together a book proposal. Those experiences are not just informative, but formative.

As I reflect on my personal journey, I don’t know that I would have been fulfilled if what I did served only an academic purpose and influenced the work of a single institution. I want to do work that is socially transformative. So, I might say, find that thing that makes your soul sing, what you feel God is calling you to contribute to the world—and make sure that that is part of your scholarly and social contribution to the world. Make sure it’s part of everything you do.

AUTHOR

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Imhotep Newsome

Ph.D. candidate, Religion

Imhotep Newsome is a Ph.D. candidate in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Duke University, advised by Dr. Stephen B. Chapman. His dissertation examines how enslaved people of African descent interpreted biblical texts in the antebellum period. He holds a B.A. in classics and history and an M.Div., both from Howard University, and is a Bass Instructional Fellow and Dean’s Graduate Fellow at Duke.