Dr. Riggs was awarded a 2017-2018 Henry Luce III Fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Association of Theological Schools; her research project was entitled: “Envisioning and Practicing Beloved Community in the 21st Century.” She received the “Distinction in Theological Education” Award from Yale Divinity School in 2012 and the Alumnae Achievement Award from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in 2006.

Dr. Riggs has served on the Editorial Boards for the Encyclopedia on Women and Religion in North America, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and the Feasting on the Word Lectionary Commentary Series. She has also chaired the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Group and has chaired or served on committees of the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Theological Schools, and The Fund for Theological Education (currently, the Forum for Theological Exploration).

Dr. Riggs is currently writing a book tentatively titled, Beloved Community for a Polarized Church and Society: An Exercise in Womanist Moral Imagination. This book explicates the ethical theory and practice that Dr. Riggs has developed, Religious Ethical Mediation™ (REM). REM prepares leaders to address religion, conflict, and violence in a transformative manner. She is the founder of an educational non-profit: Still Waters: A Center for Ethical Formation and Practices that offers training in REM.

In her own words . . .

I am a middle child. According to some psychological thinking, the middle child is sensitive to injustices, seeks fairness, and tends to be a skilled negotiator or instigator. I was the sibling who stood up for everyone’s rights (sometimes sibling vs. sibling, sibling vs. parent, parent vs. siblings). My middle child nature has developed into a ministerial vocation of being a transformative mediator in any of the contexts for ministry in which I find myself.

With the publication of my dissertation as the book, Awake, Arise, and Act: A Womanist Call for Black Liberation, my concept of a mediating ethic became the basis of a Womanist liberation ethic of responsibility. That idea of a mediating ethic has become my constructive theory and practice called Religious Ethical Mediation™ (REM). For me, REM is a worldview, a way of life, a way of being and doing as a moral agent that I have been committing to intentionally day-in-and-day-out. I dreamed an image, the process, and the name for the process, Religious Ethical Mediation, into consciousness. I am a religious ethical mediator doing my life’s work.

Working with Columbia Theological Seminary as the organizational ombudsperson, I am now applying REM as a means for institutional transformation, addressing dynamics that perpetuate racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, xenophobia, etc., working to transform the culture of exclusion into a culture of acceptance and respect. I am engaged passionately as a religious ethical mediator working with the seminary’s constituents on the transformation of relationships and systems at CTS.