Rev. Thandeka, PhD is a Unitarian Universalist theologian, minister and congregational consultant, founder and President of Love Beyond Belief™ Inc., co-creator and co-producer of the Universal Connections small group project and The Untrolling Project, and a former Emmy award-winning television producer. Thandeka has spent more than two decades studying the brain science of emotions—Affective Neuroscience (AN). As a result of her work in AN, she founded Contemporary Affect Theology (CAT), which investigates the links between religion and emotions, differentiating spiritual experiences from religious beliefs. Jaak Panksepp, the founder of AN, commends Thandeka’s “decisive historical-philosophical analysis” as work that can provide “a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experience” (The Archaeology of Mind, 391). Her books and essays have helped secure her place as a “major figure in American liberal theology,” as Gary Dorrien notes in The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2005 (John Knox Press, 2006).
