Royal Todd
In the heart of Louisville, Kentucky’s urban landscape, a young Royal Todd found himself drawn to questions that his loving, but non-religious parents couldn’t answer. What his mother lacked in formal education, she made up for in wisdom — recognizing her son’s unique curiosity and giving him, as Todd puts it, “opportunities just to be weird.”
“She only now understands how weird I am,” Todd laughs, “but she had a resolve to say, ‘I don’t necessarily know what you got going on, but I can put you around people and let you be around people who may be able to help you figure it out.’” That intuitive parenting decision led Todd to the church, where his intellectual and spiritual curiosities found fertile ground. By age 12, he had accepted his call to ministry. By 14, he was licensed to preach, and by 16, he was delivering sermons across the country. Today, as a third-year Ph.D. student studying Christian ethics at Vanderbilt University and one of this year’s Diverse Rising Graduate Scholars, Todd represents a rare breed of scholar-practitioner who refuses to compartmentalize his dual callings.
Todd’s journey to academic excellence wasn’t without its challenges. As the first in his family to pursue higher education, he enrolled at the University of Kentucky, where he stood out as the only Black philosophy major in the entire department. The questioning looks from peers and faculty didn’t deter him — if anything, they strengthened his resolve to build “my education and my sense of community involvement around the gifts that I saw God has given me stewardship over to tell a consistent story.” Even as a high school student, Todd understood the weight of responsibility. Every day after school, he would catch a 45-minute bus ride from downtown Louisville to the affluent side of town, where he worked at a mall selling shoes until 10 p.m.
This work ethic carried him through his undergraduate studies in philosophy, sociology, and African-American studies, and into his next phase at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he first pursued his Master of Divinity degree. Todd’s commitment to education was perhaps most severely tested when he moved to Nashville in July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While pursuing his M.Div., he worked full-time delivering packages for Amazon — 12-hour days, five days a week. Between delivery stops, he would join Zoom classes, contributing to discussions through chat messages, then return home to complete assignments before repeating the cycle.
Todd’s trajectory took a pivotal turn during his second year at Vanderbilt when he met Dr. Stacey Floyd-Thomas, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society. She became a model for how to “love the church, love the academy, and weave the two together.” This encounter provided what Todd calls “vocational clarity” — permission to pursue a synthesis between his dual passions rather than choosing one over the other.
“I can’t fully immerse myself in the academy and leave the church because I would feel incomplete,” Todd explains. “Likewise, I cannot sequester myself from the academy and throw myself fully into the church because I would feel incomplete. I think the two of them, to me, inform one another.” His academic path was further shaped by renowned scholar Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, who taught a “Black Lives Matter” class at Vanderbilt during Todd’s final semester in his master’s program.
“Royal Todd is one of the most gifted and brilliant students I have taught,” said Dyson, University Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt, who has mentored some of the nation’s most prominent thinkers including Drs. Marc Lamont Hill, James Braxton Peterson and Salamishah Tillett. “Royal has the real potential to join their distinguished ranks. He is both a gifted scholar and a first-rate preacher, a rare combination. I expect great things from him.”
Todd continues to embody his commitment to both vocations. He serves full-time as assistant to the pastor at the historic First Baptist Church Capitol Hill in Nashville — the same church where civil rights legends Kelly Miller Smith Sr. served as pastor and where James Lawson, Diane Nash, and John Lewis strategized the 1960s sit-in movements in the building’s lower level.
Todd’s research focuses on bringing together “the rich tapestry of the Black faith tradition in the United States” with critical theological analysis and philosophical moral conversations. Drawing inspiration from Immanuel Kant’s fundamental questions — “what ought we do? what ought we say? and what ought we hope?” — Todd examines how faith traditions can serve as “a consistent oppositional force” against systems of hegemony and supremacy.
The challenge of maintaining dual vocations is not lost on Todd. “Any one of these vocations are all consuming,” he acknowledges. “The church is made to consume you fully. The academy is made to consume you fully. And so, it’s very difficult work to not let either of them consume the other, while also letting neither of them consume you. His advice to aspiring graduate students reflects his pragmatic approach to faith and education. Using the metaphor of tools, he explains: “If you have a hammer, you can build a lot of things with that hammer .... But pursuing graduate education is saying, this is a very good hammer … but I also need a screwdriver. I also need a drill. I also need a leveler.”
