Jesse Cruz Richards

The son of a refugee feminist mother and a shipyard working father, Jesse became the first in his family to enter college and complete graduate school, having earned degrees in the humanities from Acadia University and the University of Oxford. The focus of his formal study has been Abrahamic religions, archaeology, classical rhetoric and postmodern approaches to hermeneutics and epistemology. As a Cuban-American, Jesse thinks that postcolonial philosophies of liberation might serve to provoke both religious and state actors toward an ecological conversion, and thus address the various dysfunctions of the world economy, social-religious violence, and environmental reparations. Having been born and raised in the Puget Sound, Jesse feels privileged to be back in Seattle working at the intersection of International Affairs and Religious Studies at the University of Washington.

Research interests

Abrahamic religions; global Christianity, postsecularism; interfaith cooperation; religion in America: globalization; religion and security; economic Ddvelopment in the global South; environmental racism; liberation theology; feminism; hermeneutics; epistemology; Classical rhetoric; Second-Temple Judaism; Greco-Roman archaeology; patristics.