For Almeda Wright—who’s featured in the most recent episode of NetVUE’s podcast, Callings—human flourishing depends in large part on a vision of abundance, resilience, and thriving. She notes that it does not mean that everything in our lives always goes “perfectly well,” but we do have to have “the support and the resources to encounter whatever emerges.” Even amidst difficulty, we have the capacity to flourish. “When hard times come,” she notes, you can still thrive, if “you feel that there are resources, communities, people, a sense of purpose, a sense of calling, a sense of God, or a spirituality that allows you to face it and not be overwhelmed by it.”
Such insights run throughout this special episode of Callings, which represents NetVUE’s first opportunity to record the podcast in front of a live audience; it took place this past March at the 2026 NetVUE Conference in Kansas City. This venue allowed hosts Erin VanLaningham and John Barton the chance to interview Almeda as one of the conference’s plenary speakers. (To read more about Almeda’s closing plenary session, see Krista Hughes’ reflection on it in NetVUE’s April 2026 newsletter.)
Almeda’s role in higher education and her work as a scholar and activist provide an inspiring foundation for the episode. She is an associate professor of religious education at Yale Divinity School and the author of Teaching to Live: Black Religion, Activist Educators and Radical Social Change. Her previous publications include The Spiritual Lives of Young African Americans, a co-edited book, Children, Youth, and Spirituality in a Troubling World, a special issue of Religions Journal, and various articles in scholarly journals. Her research has been supported by the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the John D. Templeton Foundation, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning, the Forum for Theological Exploration, and the Louisville Institute.
Almeda’s research focuses on African American religion and education, Womanist spirituality, adolescent spiritual development, and the intersections of religion and public life. She recently launched Communitas, a young adult ministry innovation hub at Yale, centering BIPOC young adults and seeking to create spiritual communities that connect young adult leaders with congregations and communities. She is also the co-principal investigator for the Conectere, an interdisciplinary project at NetVUE member institution Eastern Mennonite University (VA), to empower parents and caregivers in their efforts to create more secure bonds with their children and to explore ways of sharing their faith and values with their children. As this part of her work illustrates, Almeda is not only an accomplished scholar, but also an engaged activist, rooted in community.
In this episode’s conversation, Almeda draws on much of her experience from this collective work as she discusses her academic and spiritual mentors, some educational exemplars from American history, and her deep passion for teaching, student formation, and activism.
As Almeda tells a part of her own vocational story, she emphasizes two striking facets of her experience: In the first, she describes how she found a pathway to ministry in a tradition in which women were much less visible as pastors. Initially, she went to college to study electrical engineering; but then, at nineteen years old, she unexpectedly experienced a call to ministry in the shower in a dormitory at MIT. “Religion was important to me,” she shares, “but the idea of thinking about ministry, or serving a church, or serving a community wasn’t something that I thought was possible.” In her Cambridge community, though, she discovered several Black women pastors who modeled for her what was possible for her and who nurtured her calling.
In a second vignette from her vocational journey, Almeda traces an unexpected line of influence from her initial desire to be an engineer to her subsequent call to ministry. “There are,” she laughs, “family stories of me blowing stuff up from about three years old.” These destructive childhood impulses developed into curiosity and then a commitment to find out what’s not working in this world—how to take it apart and then rebuild it into something better. She admits, “I do like to tinker with things. I do have an uncanny knack for finding the blue smoke that lives in every electrical component,” basically, “blowing things up.” It’s not a huge leap to see a connection between these impulses and her work as a theologian and activist. As she says of her love for engineering, “It was not just science for the sake of science … it was engineering in the service of making a better world.”
As a scholar, she has explored this kind of service through the historical contributions of Black women whom she considers striking examples of activist educators. For Almeda, these exemplars manifest three important qualities. She draws the first two from Audrey Thomas McCluskey’s book, The Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South, positing that these exemplars have “faith in God and themselves.” When these women tried to start schools for other Black women or Black children, she observes, “they knew that they were launching out to do unimaginable things, things that no one had done prior to them … and so they had to have a level of otherworldly faith and faith in what they were able to accomplish.” But Almeda adds a third, equally important quality: “these educators also had to have faith in the students that they were teaching.” For Almeda, the true definition of an activist or radical educator lies “at the intersection of having faith in some higher calling … as well as faith in yourself to do the work that you’ve been called to do.” But perhaps most important, you must have faith “in the communities that you are called to serve,” trusting and respecting them in the collective work for justice.
In the rest of the episode, Almeda discusses her most recent book, which she describes as a “love letter to Black teachers,” emphasizing the importance of Black educators, especially for Black students. In her own educational experience, the presence of Black teachers transformed her life and made so much of her vocational journey possible: “they showed up exactly when I needed them to” and “changed the course of my life in such amazing and positive ways.” In this way, Teaching to Live is
“supposed to be an invitation for others to remember their teachers, to remember their call to teach, to remember the teachers looking beyond African American history in their own communities, in their own traditions, in their own context that might have also had that role of calling something out in them, of naming something for them that then inspires them to do something else for the good.”
This focus on remembering, naming, and narrating is central to Almeda’s teaching and preaching, all of which has its roots in womanist pedagogy. Drawing on this tradition, she reminds us how important our students’ stories are as we encounter them and as they enter our classrooms. When they come to us, “they are not coming alone … We are educating them and their parents, and their grandparents sometimes, and their communities. And so part of telling the story pedagogically is an invitation for us to learn who’s coming with them.”
To respond to this invitation—and so many more that Almeda offers in this episode—take a moment to listen to it in its entirety. And, as Almeda advises, “Stay curious and … keep listening for the places where our lives are continuing to speak to us and continuing to call us.”
Click hereto listen to the episode featuring Almeda M. Wright, “Teaching to Live.”
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.
