Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of African-American Studies and Sociology and director of the African American Studies Program at Colby College (Waterville, Maine); she is also assistant pastor for special projects at the Union Baptist Church (Cambridge, Massachusetts). She holds degrees in sociology from Northeastern University (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) and has pursued graduate theological studies at Boston University’s School of Theology. Her research, teaching, and writing have specially focused on the role of African American women in generating social change and on the diverse roles of black Christian women in the twentieth century. She is currently at work on several projects, one of which is tentatively titled I’m Building Me A Home: The Black Church as a Cultural Production. She has lectured and presented papers at colleges, universities, and scholarly conferences in the United States, Canada, Germany, England, and South Africa. She is active in several scholarly organizations, holding leadership positions in the American Sociological Association, the Association of Black Sociologists, the American Academy of Religion, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society. Some of her essays and articles are gathered in her book, If It Wasn’t for the Women: Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2001). Several of her journal articles have been reprinted in anthologies, such as African American Religious Thought: An Anthology, edited by Cornel West and Eddie Glaude (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004). Her published sermons have appeared in The African American Pulpit and elsewhere.