Publications

What does it look like to be a thermostat instead of a thermometer in a polarized world? That’s one of the questions driving the work of Dr. Jacob Alan Cook, assistant professor of Christian ethics at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and director of the Doctor of Ministry in Peacemaking and Social Change Program. In his latest piece for Christian Ethics Today, Jake draws on social science, Scripture, and decades of conflict transformation practice to offer something rare: concrete, theologically grounded strategies for depolarizing ourselves before we try to depolarize anyone else.

“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” James Baldwin asked that question in 1963. Dr. David F. Evans, Professor of History and Intercultural Studies and Associate Dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, picks it up in a new piece for Presbyterian Outlook.
Drawing on his 2025 book “Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement,” Evans argues that diversity and inclusion initiatives too often leave oppressive structures intact. What’s needed, he writes, is something more: building new structures rooted in love, solidarity, and the Black freedom tradition.

When Eastern Mennonite Seminary Professor David Evans set out to write his book about religious white progressives in the fight for Black freedom, he didn’t expect that his main thesis would flip by nearly 180 degrees. But after seven years of research and writing, Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement is just weeks away from publication. The book offers an unflinching history of white allies—namely Clarence Jordan, Dorothy Day, and Ralph Templin—and the fracturing relationships that followed when their strategies and philosophies didn’t align with Black leaders and communities.