Katie Geneva Cannon Incarnate

Abstract

Katie Geneva Cannon Incarnate Mary E. Hunt (bio) Katie Geneva Cannon arrived on the theological scene before there was one. The field was relatively staid—lots of tweed jackets with elbow patches, pipes, beards, dry lectures, and old-school ties. She and our entire cohort of women in religious studies who came of age together in the 1970s and 1980s changed all that. Her legacy is multivalent—scholarship, style, spirituality, and solidarity. The theological scene, indeed the world, is different and better because of her. I met Kate at Union Theological Seminary in New York City in the 1970s when she was a doctoral student in Hebrew Bible (Old Testament in those days) and I was first a master's student at Harvard Divinity School and later a doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She was eventually dismissed from the program that had never had an African American woman graduate before. Union Professor Beverly Wildung Harrison talked Katie into continuing her very promising work in ethics, and thus began an illustrious scholarly career that changed the very face of the field. Dr. Cannon's womanist theological ethics, expressed in books, articles, teaching, and mentoring, is now a well-established scholarly approach. It has many adherents in both academia and the Christian ministry, especially in black churches. Womanist work is studied widely and now carried on by colleagues at the Center for Womanist Leadership, Dr. Cannon's capstone project. Womanist scholarship is anything but dry. Founded on solid intellectual ground, it includes the arts, music, and ministry in a vibrant, accessible combination of preaching, teaching, and activism. The night I met her, a party was raging at Union in New York. I recall vaguely that she was the disc jockey. In any case, she brought style to that scene as she did to every place she went. She was hip; I was not. She wore wonderful clothes to my jeans and T-shirts. She knew pop music, could dance, and loved literature; I could pretty much only tell Beethoven from the Beatles, danced pitifully like an Irish white girl, and was just beginning to branch beyond theological writing to inform [End Page 109] my work. We were still in our early twenties, but already our life experiences had shaped us profoundly and differently. It took me decades to understand how deeply racism cuts into the human fabric, and how gender, class, sexuality, and race condition people's possibilities. She knew all of that then. Kate went on to become the first African American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church in 1974, then got her doctorate at Union. Pioneers never have it easy. I no longer underestimate the toll on body and soul that such "firsts" take, recalling the premature passing of my friends mujerista religious innovator Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Argentine queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, and now Katie. Katie's family in Kannapolis, North Carolina, was always very much on her mind. Only later did I learn that part of her scholarship money went to support them. Her years in New York, and later, Boston, Philadelphia, and Richmond meant that she lived in very different circles. Still, she always stayed close to family; the struggles and achievements of her nieces and nephews were part of everyday conversation. She had deep reverence for the values and commitments that she learned at home in that town named for Cannon Manufacturing, where mill workers produced sheets and towels. Her experiences there became the "fiber" of womanist ethics. Months before the illness that took her life far too early, we had some conversations about prayer and spirituality. She told me she was a great fan of labyrinths. I acknowledged that I like to walk them too. Because she had some mobility problems at the time, I found a small, pocket-sized labyrinth, one that could be prayed while seated, a little version a minister could take on pastoral visits. I had one sent to her but never heard if it arrived. Then she got sick. Now, I wonder if she ever used it, moving from margin to center and back again just as she did so frequently in...