Todne Thomas is a socio-cultural anthropologist and tenured professor. She holds a joint appointment at Yale Divinity School and Yale College. In collaboration with Afro-Caribbean and African American congregants, Thomas conducts ethnographic research on the racial, spatial, and familial dynamics of black Christian communities. Her scholarship and teaching explore intersectional constructions of power and critical forms of consciousness and practice that attend modalities of “the sacred.”
Her forthcoming book From Hate to Hallows: Re-framing Black Church Arson (contracted with Duke University Press) examines the burning of a predominately black Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2015. She argues that black church arson is an interpretive phenomenon that is best apprehended through local explanatory frameworks of religion, race, and hallowed ground.
Her book Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (Duke University Press, 2021) locates a black evangelical community at the center of their own religious story, presenting their determined spiritual relatedness as a form of insurgency. Thomas argues that kincraft—the means by which church members construct one another as brothers and sisters in Christ—animates community life. Diligently genealogical, the book traces diasporic and religious antecedents of black evangelical kin-making. The ethnography accents congregants’ critical mobilizations of kincraft against normative denominational and nuclear family constructs, and some of the ethno-racial exclusions within US evangelicalism.
Thomas is also the co-editor of New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions (2017) with Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman. She has authored peer-reviewed articles for venues, such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Anthropology and Humanism, and the Journal of African American Studies.