Scholarship & Ministry

Rewriting the Map of Church History

Most people learn a version of Christian history that runs neatly from Jerusalem to Europe to North America. Vince has built his career complicating that map — using published scholarship, peer-reviewed research, and lectures across six continents to surface Christianity's sophisticated, ancient presence throughout Africa and Asia.

His academic foundation includes a Ph.D. in Semitic and Egyptian Languages from The Catholic University of America and a graduate theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary — training that gives him direct access to primary sources in Coptic, Syriac, Ge'ez, Classical Arabic, Old Nubian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. That language range opens up texts from Nubia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and North Africa that most Western scholars simply can't read firsthand — grounded further by fieldwork like his 2024 study tour of Ethiopia.

In 2022, Vince received the Paul C.C. Szeto Fellowship for Global Studies and Research, which took him to Chad to join the excavation of medieval Kanem, a site tied to the Church's spread through trans-Saharan trade networks. He's also served on the advisory group for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art's Africa and Byzantium exhibition, and founded the Haymanot Journal, a peer-reviewed publication he edits under the traditional title of Katabi. His writing has also appeared in Horizons, the Africanus Journal, and the Dumbarton Oaks Africa and Byzantium Symposium.

None of this research stays inside academic walls by design — Vince has built his scholarly work specifically to reach the communities it's about, particularly those of African and African-American descent who've rarely seen their heritage reflected back in the faith they practice.

Where the Scholarship Leads

For Vince, research has never been the endpoint — it feeds directly into pastoral work with communities that history has pushed to the margins. That conviction led him to found the Meachum School of Haymanot, built to give contextualized scriptural education to leaders from historically marginalized communities, teaching courses like Urban Evangelism and Urban Apologetics. The Louisville Institute recognized this work by including him on a Collaborative Inquiry Grant research team.

That same throughline — that faith and cultural identity were never actually in tension — runs through his work with the Jude 3 Project, his podcast appearances, and every lecture he gives at HBCUs and community gatherings. Growing up in St. Louis, Vince was told directly that race and justice weren't the Church's concern. His scholarship exists, in part, to prove that assumption wrong.