Search Results (9)

This article theorizes a womanist semiotics of advocacy by reading the unnamed Shunammite woman of 2 Kings 4—renamed Polet (defender)—alongside Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching crusade. A womanist semiotics decodes how Black women’s bodies and voices signify within systems of White patriarchal power that simultaneously demand their advocacy while denying them protection. Through close readings of biblical narrative and historical archive, the article identifies five components that structure Black women’s resistance: communal grounding, strategic alliance-building, trauma witness, prophetic truth-telling, and sacred self-preservation. Both women embodied kenotic love—a paradoxical self-emptying that becomes fierce self-assertion—confronting prophetic and political authority to demand accountability for life against death. This framework exposes how contemporary democratic systems exploit Black women as “democracy’s backbone” while marginalizing their policy priorities, and offers theological authorization for strategic withdrawal from exploitative contexts. By centering Black women’s epistemological standpoint, this womanist ethic reframes rest and disengagement not as abandonment but as revolutionary self-love essential for sustainable justice work. Full article

This study examines how Black women navigate spiritual widowhood and cosmological disinheritance in contemporary America through the biblical figure of Ruth. Employing what I call a critical embodied epistemology (CEE)—a womanist methodology integrating Hortense Spillers’ hieroglyphics of the flesh, Michel Foucault’s genealogical analysis, and Emilie Townes’ ethical reimagination—this article analyzes Ruth’s transgressive movements as a template for sacred belonging beyond State-sanctioned citizenship. Against the backdrop of reproductive rights rollbacks, voting restrictions, and the political rejection of Black women’s leadership, the research reveals how African-descended cosmology offers alternative frameworks for community, covenant, and citizenship. Findings demonstrate that Ruth’s embodied risk on the threshing floor models what I term “faith in the fracture”—an insurgent spirituality that refuses to tether sacred belonging to empire. The study contributes to womanist theology, political theology, and diaspora studies by theorizing sacred citizenship as relational rather than national, and by centering embodied knowledge as theological epistemology. Implications include reconceptualizing belonging for all marginalized communities navigating displacement, State abandonment, and cosmological rupture. Full article

In the interface of Christian ethics, autoethnography and Indigenous knowledge, I propose a Christian moral imagination of cohabitation based on interdependence and enablement. I use non-archival community knowledge and oral memory to excavate moral wisdom from my grandmother’s garden. I argue that to be interdependent is to be human, and the creation of a “social condition of livable lives” is a necessary requirement of cohabitation. Methodologically, this paper builds on liberative ethics and its emphasis on moral oughts as “derivatives of survivals”. I conclude that the deep-seated intentionality to live well and be fully human is the soul of Christian ethics. Though the story centers on my grandmother and her kitchen garden, the paper is transnational and contributes to the global discussion on what it means to live well. It adds moral knowledge centered on Indigenous people’s world-making paradigm. This paper is not an Indigenous perspective of Christian ethics. Rather, it is a paradigmatic paper built on the way that Indigenous people engage with the world (relationality) and with each other. Full article

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works. Full article

“Who can find a virtuous woman?” (Prov. 31:10 KJV). My entire life, I have heard and read messages about the “virtuous” woman, as depicted in Proverbs 31:10–31. Though many herald this character as the standard for godly women, I find her portrayal problematic. She is depicted as a one-dimensional worker bee, never engaged in rest, recreation, or relationship building. Further, her spiritual location and formation go unmentioned. How did such a limited illustration become the religious paradigm by which women and girls are measured? At its root is white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalistic misogyny (WSPCM), employed in churches to consign women to “safe”, secondary status while still using them as workhorses and sources of income to keep institutions viable. Once internalized, women and girls bear the crushing weight of an unhealthy, unattainable achievement, struggling to become a fictitious, unrealistic figure. In this article, I refute the WSPCM interpretation of the Proverbs 31 woman as the standard for faithful, Spirit-filled women, offering instead a liberative paradigm grounded in womanist hermeneutics, ethics, and spirituality. This approach provides a critique of and corrective for the oppressive, erroneous, and dangerous interpretations of “virtue” and “womanhood” that do violence to female personhood, especially in the name of religion. Full article

For the last thirty years, white evangelical Christians have been one of the most prominent groups in the anti-trafficking movement in North America. Whether advocating for policy changes on behalf of survivors, interacting with populations vulnerable to sexual exploitation, or staging rescues, these moral actors use Christian religious practices and values to respond to trafficking and commercial sex work. Anti-trafficking work is coated with and coded by evangelical whiteness, which uses the norms of sexual, social, and racial purity in their interactions with and recovery of trafficking victims and survivors. In response to the white evangelical stronghold on anti-trafficking interventions, the womanist ethic of encounter utilizes womanist frameworks to center the historical realities lived experience of Black women and talk back to the history of evangelical whiteness in anti-trafficking work. Secondly, it focuses on how to interact with the holistic body of Black women in the urban mission field of anti-trafficking. Finally, the womanist ethic of encounter seeks to bridge the gap between the Protestant moralistic centering of the word of the Gospel that coats rescue and recovery efforts and asserts a Catholic centering of the Eucharist to clarify the power of sacrificing and breaking the body of whiteness in anti-trafficking work. Full article

Hannah’s story in the Old Testament has been written about considerably by Jewish feminists, womanist theologians, and other biblical scholars. This paper strives to build upon these works in asking the reader to consider Hannah’s story from a liberatory theological theory of suffering by Sölle, as well as a postmodern and non-religious lens as discussed by Sandoval’s Theory of Oppositional Consciousness in Methodology of the Oppressed and Lorde’s “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”. This paper asks if this narrative can serve as an example of taking back one’s power by confronting a complex system of power and oppression for Black women. Intercessory prayer aptly defines the personal as political, especially with the multiple minoritized identities of Hannah. I argue that Hannah’s story can serve as a complex narrative of differential consciousness and the reclamation of one’s own power, by using her voice. Her audacity to correct a prophet, fight for her valid desire of motherhood, and determine her own happiness is evidence of an empowerment ethic that is necessary for minoritized women in a post-modern era and political climate where the erasure of all forms of difference and consciousness is the priority. Full article

The Black Lives Matter movement has become one of the most visible, controversial, and impactful campaigns to address racialized violence and discrimination in the 21st century. Activists within the movement join traditional forms of social protest and policy development with rituals and spiritual practices, drawing upon spiritual resources as a source of transformation and empowerment. The transformative aims of Black Lives Matter and other contemporary African American justice movements address critical areas for reform, like criminal justice, education, and public health, but their vision for reform is broad and extensive, envisioning the creation of a more just world. As such, the physical context for African American life—the buildings and public spaces known as the built environment—is a crucial aspect of social transformation. This essay examines the spirituality of Black Lives Matter and other contemporary African American justice movements and considers how it inspires the ongoing transformation of buildings and public spaces. By analyzing the spiritual practices and themes in the Black Lives Matter movement as described by its founders, this paper identifies three principles and relates them to similar concepts in African American religious thought, womanist ethics, and ecowomanism. Applying these three spiritual principles—liberation, inspiration, and healing—to the design of architecture and public spaces can enrich and affirm African American life. Appealing to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture as an example, this paper articulates the possibilities of architectural projects to symbolically and practically support liberative goals in African American religious systems and political movements. Full article

Foundational Black Womanist Christian Theology has suffered from the focus on Alice Walker’s 1983 four-part womanist definition at the exclusion of her 1979 short story, Coming Apart. The focus on the 1983 definition and the exclusion of Coming Apart has left an invisbilizing effect on the centrality of reliance on African-American lesbian literature and wisdom in womanist Christian methodology. The invisibilization can be corrected, in part, through interpolating Coming Apart with the 1983 definition, utilizing a Black Buddhist lesbian Womanist hermeneutic, and additional Womanist engagement in Womanist Consultations. This correction has implications for Christian theologies that may be heterosexist, homophobic, and patriarchal, Biblical interpretation, preaching, and epistemological processes. Full article