We Are All Witnesses - by Mitzi J Smith & Michael Willett Newheart (Hardcover)

About the Book

"We Are All Witnesses is a remarkable, sassy, creative, disruptive, and deeply personal textbook. It is like no other text on biblical interpretation. Smith and Newheart have produced a groundbreaking milestone book about how to do biblical interpretation that prioritizes justice and the reader's context. It is both memoir and metatestimony! The layperson, college students, and seminary students will find this book accessible. It is indeed creative, witty, and wayward!"--

Book Synopsis

We Are All Witnesses is a remarkable, sassy, creative, disruptive, and deeply personal textbook. It is like no other text on biblical interpretation. Smith and Newheart have produced a groundbreaking milestone book about how to do biblical interpretation that prioritizes justice and the reader's context. It is both memoir and metatestimony! The layperson, college students, and seminary students will find this book accessible. It is indeed creative, witty, and wayward!

Review Quotes

"This book integrates soul and mind. Across a range of New Testament texts, Mitzi Smith and Michael Willett Newheart testify to the integration of public biblical interpretation with personal and communal experience. This book is a gift."
--Greg Carey, Lancaster Theological Seminary

"Witnessing and testimony are central to the project of Smith and Newheart's We Are All Witnesses. Our varying contexts, journeys of faith, and life experiences demand that we adhere to their call for 'hermeneutical humility.' I highly recommend this book as a pedagogical model for doing biblical interpretation that is both creative and disruptive of injustice."
--Angela N. Parker, Mercer University

"We Are All Witnesses' exhilarating and engrossing collection of essays represents an epistemological earthquake for serious biblical interpreters weary of tepid, bowdlerized approaches to Christian Testament interpretation. At last, we have a sturdy, subtle, original scholarly work that explores the deep ideational, transformative, and threatening potential of viewing the Christian Testament as a 'canonized collection of testimonies' that are, at once, inescapably subjective, transformative, and disruptive."
--Clarice J. Martin, Colgate University

"Smith and Newheart invite the reader into their lively and important conversations through their interdisciplinary and intersectional readings of biblical stories. They model for us how to claim our agency as readers of biblical texts through learning to question from our own social locations. They also show us a variety of ways to consider both texts and contexts, historical and contemporary, and they challenge traditional assumptions and interpretations by calling out unjust readings."
--Tina Pippin, Agnes Scott College

About the Author

Mitzi J. Smith is J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa, College of the Humanities, Institute of Gender Studies. She co-edited Bitter the Chastening Rod (2022); co-authored Toward Decentering the New Testament (2018); and authored Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality and Biblical Interpretation (2018).



Michael Willett Newheart is professor emeritus of New Testament at Howard University School of Divinity, and interim ministry specialist, American Baptist Churches of the USA. He is the author of "My Name Is Legion" The Story and Soul of the Gerasene Demoniac (2004).



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