[1] Smith has cited those who have influenced her scholarship at Harvard, including Francois Bovon, Allen Callahan, Cain Hope Felder, Katie Cannon, emilie townes, Clarice Martin, and Renita Weems.
[8] For Smith, "external others" are those in Acts who are close in "religious and functional proximity" to the apostles but are portrayed as the antagonistic characters of that relationship.
[7] Women in the early Jesus movement were either not described as "filled with the Spirit," or their roles within the community were minimized by how Acts portrays them as subordinate to Peter and Paul.
[7] For Smith, re-reading Acts in this way helps challenge the tendency of being blind to the polemical and political "othering" in texts that are considered sacred and infallible.
When a text achieves such a status, it becomes easy for its readers to perceive its treatment and description of "others" as "paradigmatic models for and prescriptive for social practice.