Women Theologians Research Articles

The Role of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in Engendering Theological Higher Education in Africa

This article explores the transformative role of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in engendering higher theological education in Africa. Grounded in African Women’s theology, the study analyses initiatives in championing gender equality, inclusivity, and intersectional solidarity within theological academia. The study highlights the historic journey of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in promoting the integration of gender-sensitive curricular and nurturing a new generation of African women theologians. Methodologically, I adopt a qualitative design and use African Women’s Theology as a lens to understand the transformative strides made by the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians towards engendering theological higher education in Africa.

Disciplining the Female Voice: A Foucauldian Analysis of the Lairam Isua Krista Baptist Church’s (LIKBK) Gender Dynamics

This study interrogates the Church's professed commitment to human rights and gender equality, with a specific focus on its treatment of women and women theologians, using the LIKBK Church as a case study. Despite women's significant contributions to the Church's sustenance and growth, their voices and participation remain marginalized. Employing Michel Foucault's theoretical framework, this research critically analyzes the LIKBK Church's role in perpetuating gender inequality, highlighting the ways in which its power structures and discourses silence and exclude women. By examining the contradictions between the Church's rhetoric and practices, this paper reveals the institution's complicity in sidelining women's agency and perpetuating gender-based oppression. The case study of LIKBK Church provides a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics at play and offers insights into the ways in which religious institutions can perpetuate gender inequality.

When a Poem Hits You in the (White) Face

AbstractThis article seeks to acknowledge the issue of problematic whiteness in listening to Black experiences through reflecting on the poem “Mirroring” by the womanist theologian Doreen Hazel and in the writing of a poem by the author as an artistic piece. Against a feeling of despair about xenophobia, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the way people talk about refugees, the poem seeks to find the light of hope and to imagine the kingdom and how to participate in it.

Hagar’s spirituality prior to and after captivity: An African and gendered perspective

This study is an exploration of the Hagar narrative from the perspective of African Womanist Theology. The article focuses on the spirituality of Hagar before and after her captivity (Gn 16). The research takes an Afrocentric perspective and uses a postcolonial lens to comment on the preceding text as well as consider how this story is captured in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At the core of the article is an attempt at reclaiming the African in Hagar who is largely portrayed in the stories of Sarah and Abraham within a Hebrew perspective which itself is arguably imperial. The aim is to inspire modern African women (and in the diaspora) to reclaim their African spirituality within their stories and experiences. Summarily, the article is a critique of the colonial project, slavery and its legacies in dehumanising and disenfranchising people and African knowledge systems. The article is structured as follows: firstly, it introduces the Hagar and/or Hajar traditions from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Secondly, it takes a step back to consider Hagar’s identity as an Egyptian princess before she encountered Sarah and Abraham. The article also discusses how Hagar’s past in Egypt had a bearing on her spiritual encounters when she and her son Ishmael and/or Ismail were exiled. Finally, the article concludes with a recommendation for continued reflection on an African spirituality narrative of the Hagar traditions alongside the predominant narratives from Abrahamic religions.Contribution: This article demonstrates that the religious scriptures must be read from liberation perspectives such as the postcolonial paradigm to inspire the recovery of authentic experiences of the oppressed and displaced, and it is an inspiration to African women to reclaim their true identity and spirituality.

Chrześcijański feminizm w Afryce – kontynentalne dyskursy i lokalne praktyki

<p>This paper discusses selected research topics developed by feminist theologians connected with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. The Circle was established in 1989 and was led for many years by Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a Ghanaian Methodist theologian. Today the Circle attracts women theologians from three generations and various African countries. The paper refers to feminist and postcolonial theories as well as some more African-oriented topics developed in the Circle’s writings. Complex and ambiguous reinterpretations of the so-called African Traditional Religion are framed by references to inculturation and liberation theology. The final part of the paper refers to the concept of “oral theology” and theology in practice. The author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana among Catholic women is mentioned to draw parallels between the theological practical approach and the anthropological concept of lived religion.</p>

Decolonizing and Decoloniality in African Women Theology

AbstractDecolonization and decoloniality offer potential gains to African Women Theology (AWT) to address the intersections, continuities, and discontinuities between the pre‐colonial, colonial, and Christian gender ideologies that have disempowered African women. While African women theologians have, at different points, identified the patriarchal forces in these three spheres, an intentional intersectional approach has not always successfully challenged the colonial meta‐narratives of the construction of the African man. Decolonization and decoloniality offer a critical theoretical framework to not only deal with gender meta‐narratives but to deconstruct and dismantle these narratives to develop responses that are appropriate for their communities. These perspectives will also cement AWT as a major player in the renewed calls for decolonization and decoloniality in Africa. This article acknowledges an intersectionality of traditional, colonial, and post‐colonial patriarchies and the persistence of coloniality in the present spaces in which AWT operates, as well as discontinuities in the gender perspectives in these different periods.

A Black Womanist Theomethaxis

This article offers a new tool for women of color scholars to write and analyze the data and archive from their own life journals and journeys. Coining a new concept of theomethaxis, a Black Womanist Theomethaxis framework is an integration of theory, methodology, and praxis focused on the intersection of race, gender, and spirituality. It uses Black women’s autobiography, critical praxis autoethnography, counter-storytelling, and Black girl cartography as methodological tools. Drawing from cultural studies, feminist theories, African American history, women’s history, and childhood studies, it integrates theoretical constructs from Black feminist thought, Black girlhood studies, Critical Black Feminism, Hip-Hop Feminism, Crunk Feminism, New Black Feminism, Womanist thought, Womanist theology, and the Wild Woman Archetype. Integrating personal narrative, the article illustrates how the framework facilitated the praxis of analyzing 45 years of journals, revealing revolutionary and transformational themes in the initiation journey from Black girlhood to Black womanhood. The concept of a womanist theomethaxis may also provide a framework for application to other academic areas and studies, such as Chicana/Latina feminist studies, Asian American feminist studies, and Indigenous feminist studies.

광주항쟁의 시적 재현: ‘해방된 모성’의 구현과 ‘어머니 하느님

This paper analyzed the poetic representation of the Gwangju Uprising focusing on Goh Jeong-Hee’s Poetry of May. Goh Jeong-Hee was influenced by Korean women's theology in the 1980s. Korean female theologians criticized the oppression of women under the patriarchal system and raised the Mother God as the source of life. In the late 1980s, the reality faced by women was defined as the reality of killing and insisted on a great transition to life. She stressed that women should be the subject of the unification movement in order to overcome the national contradictions that suppress women. Of course, prior to Christian epistemology, there was a reality of the 1980s in Goh Jeong-Hee’s poetry and Gwangju was at the center of it. However, when the truth of the Gwangju Uprising was not revealed in the late 80s, Goh Jeong-Hee expressed deep despair and skepticism. And using Christian death and resurrection as motifs, the experience of despair was used as an opportunity to move toward a fundamental revolution. Goh Jeong-Hee hinted at the need for a new language by evoking the women’s pain and anger what are not reduced from a male-centered system to a universal language through a ‘Michineon’. And while attempting a revolutionary transformation of thoughts and customs, she embodied death in the uprising as an event that c the birth of life. The Gwangju Uprising was an opportunity for mother to be called the subject of liberation and Mother God to be called the source of life, and was a turning point in transforming Gwangju into a land of livelihood and resurrection. This is because Goh Jeong-Hee found Mother God in women in Gwangju as the source of life. Women in Gwangju, who were considered victims of the uprising and innocent victims, were another main subject of the uprising that supported the community of life by saving the dead, caring for the injured, and feeding the living. Goh Jeong-Hee proved that the practice of living shown by women in Gwangju turned the time stained with violence and death into a 10-day liberation zone. And Goh Jeong-Hee‘s May poem shows a vision of a community of care that we talk about as an alternative society today. Although it has not been fully discussed by Goh Jeong-Hee herself, it is inferred that liberated motherhood uses solidarity and relationship that support each other's lives as its principle. The new world created by female subjects makes us imagine a community of autonomous and mutually beneficial care based on liberated motherhood.

“I’ve never seen a Black woman chaplain before:” From personal narratives to hypotheses

This article shifts the traditional approach to case studies in healthcare chaplaincy from questions about what chaplains do to questions of who chaplains are and how they experience the work. We draw insights from womanist theology to offer three narratives written by African American healthcare chaplains that illustrate themes of intersectionality, the effects interview contexts have on training and work, and key questions that emerge while doing the work. These narratives honor the largely invisible work of African-American chaplains while raising central hypotheses for research and intervention we outline in conclusion.

The importance of embodiment from a womanist perspective: an interview with Tessa Henry-Robinson

ABSTRACT The original keynote at the conference was in the form of a panel discussion entitled Embodiment in Black and Womanist Theologies, chaired by Delroy Hall with the contributions of Anthony Reddie and Jarel Robinson-Brown. Tessa Henry-Robinson was also due to be on the panel but was unable to be present. The session developed into an inspiring and challenging theological reflection on the experience of the contributors, all black men living in the UK. However, the female and womanist voice was missing. In this article, Tessa Henry-Robinson makes an important contribution to discussions about embodiment and particularity from a black woman’s perspective, as someone who has known marginalisation and oppression, and is now moving into a position of more influence and authority in her role as Moderator of the General Assembly United Reformed Church from July 2023 onwards, the first ethnically minoritised woman to hold this role. In this article, in response to questions set by Manon Ceridwen James, she explores her experience, her research into embodiment from a womanist perspective, and her hopes for her new role.

Table of Contents, Vol. 12, Special Issue 1, Intersectional Methods and Moral Theology

Intersectionality is a tool for theological analysis that invites sustained critical reflection on how gender, race, social class, sexual identity, citizenship status, and other forms of difference shape people’s perceptions of God, the human person, the church, and the moral life. Scholars of moral theology increasingly recognize how the biases of one’s lived experience integrally shapes one’s theological reasoning. Beyond the need to name, identify, and analyze our biases as an integral part of our theological methods, we also need to create space for discourse that seeks to bridge our differences. This special issue of the Journal of Moral Theology brings together seven essays that focus on intersectionality as a theological method and its implications for the practice of moral theology. Scholars in moral theology, liberation theologies, feminist and womanist theologies, and decolonial theologies demonstrate how intersectional methods are employed in constructive theological discourse.

The Bride of Christ with a hellish existence on earth: Insights from Eboni Turman, the black church and black liberation theology

This research is based on the reading of Eboni Turman’s work that focuses on body politics, especially through a theological paradigm. The study confirms that the body is a theological problem, and the extent of the problem stretches to the annals of Christian theology to the present, especially in light of racism, sexism and capitalism. The study will engage black womanist eschatology to draw from the rich well of seeing how the experience of black women gives new meaning to understanding the presence and coming of God through wrestling and struggle. The study will use the black church, especially in the United States of America (USA), to dialogue with. The researcher has previously done work on the black church in the USA and South Africa, as well as work on the contribution of African womanist theologians. Thus, the study uses the USA purely because of Eboni Turman’s discussion on the body as a theological problem.Contribution: The study seeks to invite men and the black church to remember the black sacred dance from old, which has remained with black women as they continue to dance, thus critiquing those who are out of rhythm and need it now more than ever.

The Routledge Handbook of African Theology

The Routledge Handbook of African Theology

Lisa Allen, A Womanist Theology of Worship: Liturgy, Justice, and Communal Righteousness

A review of Lisa Allen, A Womanist Theology of Worship: Liturgy, Justice, and Communal Righteousness.

Review: The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought, by Roger A. Sneed

Review: <i>The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought</i>, by Roger A. Sneed

The influence of social status and identity in a struggle for matriarchal power: Genesis 16:1–15

The Genesis 16 narrative is a story about power afforded to individuals based on social status and identity. As such, modern readings of Gen 16 (and Gen 21) unsurprisingly informed the genesis of womanist theology. In her seminal text, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, Delores Williams offers a theological perspective centering the social and historical experiences of Black women in biblical and theological interpretation by examining Hagar’s story. This article takes a fresh look at Gen 16:1–15 by examining the influence of social status and identity in a struggle for matriarchal power between Hagar and Sarai. It does this by understanding the sociocultural context of the ancient Near East, as well as English translation choices that serve as barriers to interpretation for a modern audience. Modern Bible readers draw parallels between this text and modern struggles against oppressive power systems and are reminded of God’s sovereignty and action in favor of the oppressed.

Talking God and Talking Cancer: Why Womanist Ethics Matters for Breast Cancer Prevention and Control among Black Women

Elizabeth Williams, first, articulates a Womanist approach that denounces the racial disparities and inequities in access to preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic services for Black women in the United States. Second, she highlights how grass-roots organizations empower women and allow them to take back their health. Moreover, Womanist theology and spirituality, and particularly Womanist ethics, serve Black women in making sense of and responding to breast cancer by promoting breast cancer control and prevention for Black women and by supporting Black women in dealing with the crises breast cancer brings in their lives and in society.

Walking Together to the Promised Land

AbstractThis article posits that Black theology of liberation (BTL) focused only on race and class, even when it included patriarchy in its theological vision, thus running the risk of truncating the liberation of Black humanity. The rigidity of patriarchy and the continued tendency of BTL to speak of the Black community as if Black women do not exist is a problem. It is only by debunking and critiquing the androcentric perspectives of Black consciousness and BTL and clarifying, therefore, the type of womanism that might assist in a quest for the comprehensive liberation of Black personhood. This is what is envisioned in this article: a womanism that stands face to face with another’s struggles and lived experiences of Black women and men. This paper identifies the tenets of the dialogue between Black theologies of liberation and womanist theologies and argues for a comprehensive, combined vision that debunks Eurocentric, conquering, and patriarchal systems of knowledge, life, and spirituality.

The Holy Spirit and Incarnational Living: Ecowomanist Reflections

This article asks, ‘Who is the Holy Spirit in the Christian message and what specifically is the cultural understanding of the Holy Spirit in the thought of womanist theologians?’ First, it offers a description of the meaning of ‘womanist’, particularly according to Alice Walker, who coined the term, in part to lift up African American women’s cultural understanding of ‘womanish’, particularly with reference to daughters who claim agency as freedom fighters. Second, it states who the Holy Spirit is in relation to God and to the Trinity as a whole. Third, as a Christian ecowomanist essay that employs Walker’s description of ‘womanist’, it is attentive to God’s redemptive aim for all creation, heaven and earth, in other words for the entire cosmos.

Book Review: Allen, Lisa: A Womanist Theology of Worship: Liturgy, Justice, and Communal Righteousness

Book Review: Allen, Lisa: <i>A Womanist Theology of Worship: Liturgy, Justice, and Communal Righteousness</i>