Celebrating Black History Month / Women of Color & Womanism

Enfleshing Freedom harvests insights of black women's historical experience for theology and rethinks what it means to be human in light of African American experience.

This book provides a brief review of the rich heritage of African American female proclaimers and examines contemporary African American women's sermon preparation, content, delivery, and personhood. Brown draws heavily on interviews and conversations, as well as audio and video tapes of women proclaiming God's word, to relate how and why African American women tell others about God despite resistance (weary throats) and with the help of support (new songs) in religious and social communities.

This historic collection of never-before-published sermons by African American women preachers gives voice to the long-ignored founding mothers of the African American church. It provides long overdue access to the original text of the sermons coupled with expert contextual analysis by Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, a respected scholar of African American history.

In This Is My Story, thirteen successful African American women clergy tell the powerful, inspirational, and sometimes heartbreaking stories of their calls and ministerial journeys, which they experienced in the midst of anguish, uncertainty, and in many cases unfriendly leadership environments. Each of the women includes a sermon of particular importance to her.

Ross shows how female civil rights activists' moral formation and work reflect both womanist consciousness and practices of witness and testimony, both emergent from the black religious context. Examining black women's civil rights activism as religiously impelled moral practices brings new insight on the movement and lifts up a paradigm for engagement in the challenges of contemporary social life.

Pauli Murray (1910-1985) is regarded as one of the least discussed figures in the history of twentieth-century African American women's activism. She was a highly regarded Feminist, who called attention to the plight of women, especially the colored and working poor.

This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, the volume critically examines racism, sexism, poverty, and stereotypes.

Aimed specially at black Christian women but appropriate for all feminist readers, these reflective tales/essays by a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church focus on biblical women's relationships: sometimes exploitative (Sarah and Hagar), sometimes mutually supportive (Ruth and Naomi). Most feature third-person narrative cum analysis and close with discussion questions; others are first-person narratives, like the imaginary letter from Lot's wife to her daughters.

Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder provides an engaging womanist reading of mother characters in the Old and New Testaments. After providing a brief history of womanist biblical interpretation, she shows how the stories of several biblical mothers--Hagar, Rizpah, Bathsheba, Mary, the Canaanite woman, and Zebedee's wife--can be powerful sources for critical reflection, identification, and empowerment. Crowder also explores historical understandings of motherhood in the African American community and how these help to inform present-day perspectives.

While womanist biblical interpretation is relatively new in the development of academic biblical studies, African American women are not newcomers to biblical interpretation. Written in an accessible style, this volume highlights the importance of both the Bible and race in the development of feminism and the emergence of womanism. It provides a history of feminist biblical interpretation and discusses the current state of womanist biblical interpretation as well as critical issues related to its development and future. Although some African American women identify themselves as "womanists," the term, its usage, its features, and its connection to feminism remain widely misunderstood. This excellent textbook is perfect for helping to introduce readers to the development and applications of womanist biblical interpretation.

Third wave womanism is a new movement within religious studies with deep roots in the tradition of womanist religious thoughtwhile also departing from it in key ways.After a helpful and orienting introduction, this volume gathers essays from established and emerging scholars whose work is among the most lively and innovative scholarship today.The result is a lively conversation in which to question is not to disavow; to depart is not necessarily to reject and where questioning and departing are indications of the productive growth and expansion of an important academic and religious movement.

Deeper Shades of Purple brings together a who's who of scholars in the study of Black women and religion who view their scholarship through a womanist critical lens. The contributors revisit Alice Walker's definition of womanism for its viability for the approaches to discourses in religion of Black women scholars. Whereas Walker has defined what it means to be womanist, these contributors define what it means to practice womanism, and illuminate how womanism has been used as a vantage point for the theoretical orientations and methodological approaches of Black women scholar-activists.

What does the mostly male Afrocentric scholarship contribute to the survival, wholeness, and liberation of black women? In this volume social ethicist Cheryl Sanders and other leading womanist thinkers take the measure of the Afrocentric idea and explore the intricate relationship between Afrocentric and womanist perspectives in their lives and commitments. Their strong, frank assessments form a creative engagement of these two momentous streams.

Introducing Womanist Theology describes the unique experiences of African American women and explores not only what theology is, but how it is constructed. It lays out the major components of womanist theology while showing the close links between womanist theology and womanist ethics. By examining some of its major contributors and exploring challenges it faces, including relationships with feminist and black theologians, Introducing Womanist Theology provides a thorough and accessible entree into this vibrant contemporary theology.

This book is a collection of essays by thirteen feminist and womanist authors who locate themselves within the Reformed tradition. Topics explored include: the Trinity, creation, election, atonement, the church, fear, resistance, and vocation. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students interested in feminist theology. The Columbia Series in Reformed Theology represents a joint commitment by Columbia Theological Seminary and Westminster John Knox Press to provide theological resources from the Reformed tradition for the church today. This series examines theological and ethical issues that confront church and society in our own particular time and place.

Mining the Motherlode clearly defines the tenets, resources, and methods of womanist Christian social ethics by providing a womanist orientation on how racial and gender ideologies as well as social position inform research methods for this field. Floyd-Thomas accomplishes this by articulating the methodological contributions that womanist ethicists have made in this field of Christian ethics, distinguishing between traditional Christian ethics and liberation ethics, upholding Black women's moral struggles with race, class, and gender as an essential context to inform ethical inquiry and new possibilities for social justice.

Writing across theological disciplines, nine African American women scholars reflect on what it means to live as responsible doers of justice. With some classic essays and some contributions published here for the first time, each chapter in this new volume in the Library of Theological Ethics series presents analytical strategies for understanding the story of womanist scholarship in the service of the black community. The Library of Theological Ethics series focuses on what it means to think theologically and ethically. It presents a selection of important and otherwise unavailable texts in easily accessible form. Volumes in this series will enable sustained dialogue with predecessors though reflection on classic works in the field.

In this collection of essays, prayers, and meditations, Diana Hayes lays the foundation of womanist spirituality in the lived faith and struggles of African American women.This spirituality, as she observes, "flows from their lived encounters with God, nurtured and sustained with sweat, tears, and blood as they worked the fields, worked in the homes of white families, worked in factories and wherever else they could to support their families and build their communities.... It is a spirituality which arises from a deep and abiding faith in a God of love, a wonder-working God who walked and talked with them, giving them the strength to persevere."Beginning with the story of her own spiritual journey -- her upbringing in the AME Zion Church where she encountered "a God who loved me into life," her training as a lawyer, conversion to Catholicism, and determination to become a theologian -- Hayes offers a moving, inspiring, and challenging window on the lived faith of African American women today.

The Womanist Preacher: Proclaiming Womanist Rhetoric from the Pulpit performs a close textual analysis of five womanist sermons to answer the question: how does womanist preaching attempt to transform/adapt the tenets of womanist thought to make it rhetorically viable in the church? And what is gained and lost in this? The sermons come from five women who are considered exemplars of womanist preaching: Elaine M. Flake, Gina M. Stewart, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Melva L. Sampson, and Claudette A. Copeland. This book takes the first step in womanist scholarship to dissect what is rhetorically going on in womanist preaching, to categorize womanist sermons under the four tenets of womanist preaching, and to then create four rhetorical models that reflect the rhetorical attributes of the four different categories or phrased tenets that Stacey Floyd-Thomas uses to represent Alice Walker's "womanist" definition.

This volume is an interdisciplinary exploration of the interplay between the contemporary Black Church in the United States and African American womanist spirituality and social witness. Historically, the Black Church itself has represented a strong yoking of social witness and spirituality. This blend has endured whether the primary theology and ethical import of the Church has been accomodationist or protest-oriented. African American women in the Church have carried this legacy in their lived witness of spirituality and social action.