A B O U T M E
My work examines the intersection of Christian political thought, race, and environment. My first book, The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. I have work published or forthcoming in the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Studia Patristica, Biblical Interpretation, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, and more. You can find some of these writings as well as a full CV here.
I’m currently Assistant Professor of Theology, Race, and Environment at Saint Louis University. Previously I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia in the multidisciplinary Engagements program, and before that I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Duke University, where I received my PhD from the Religious Studies program, supported by an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship.
I was born in the Mississippi Delta to a Venezuelan immigrant and a white Southerner, and my research interests grow out of — and often return to — early encounters with the messy geographies of race and religion, with violence and its antidotes, and with the sort of projects of collective struggle toward justice which remain orthogonal to and thus uncaptured by the categories of the secular and the religious.
I’m currently working on a book on climate justice, race, and theology, titled tentatively We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Solidarity at the End of the World.
Contact me at matthew [dot] elia [at] slu [dot] edu.
Design work here.
My favorite film, like all right thinking people, is Paddington 2.
