Mary E. Hess is Professor of Educational Leadership at Luther Seminary, where she has taught since 2000. During the 2016-2017 year she held the Patrick and Barbara Keenan Visiting Chair in Religious Education at the University of St. Michael’s College, in the University of Toronto. Hess has degrees from Yale, Harvard and Boston College, and has directed a number of projects focusing on the challenges of media culture for communities of faith. As an educator straddling the fields of media studies and religious studies, Hess has focused her research on exploring ways in which participatory strategies for knowing and learning are constructed and contested amidst digital cultures. She is particularly interested in dialogic forms of organizational development, and the challenges posed to communities by oppressive systems such as racism, classism, sexism, and so on. Hess publishes regularly in academic journals, and is a past president of the Religious Education Association. Hess’ print publications, her blog, and other digital sites are curated at meh.religioused.org

Together Stephen Brookfield and Mary Hess have authored Becoming a White Antiracist to be published by Stylus Publishers in Spring 2021.