Racism at the End of White Christian America

Chapter 1 engages in social analysis to outline the current racial landscape in churches in the United States. Beginning with our current political and religious moment, it addresses and defines the many layers to the problem of whiteness. Drawing on the work of James Baldwin, womanist theology, and contemporary sociology, this chapter describes whiteness as a process of social and identity formation currently experiencing a crisis of legitimation. This current legitimation crisis has precipitated the phenomenon of colorblindness, which leads white people to see our interests and perspectives as universal, blinds us to our epistemological limitations, and leads to a posture of defensiveness and fragility. The chapter concludes by arguing that whiteness presents itself as a “wicked problem” with no identifiable solution.

Womanish and sassy: Remembrance, retelling, and liberation of her (Matthew 26:6–13)

This article examines the story of the unnamed woman in Matt 26:6–13 through the lens of womanist theology and Black liberation theology. By encountering the text through the experiences of Black women, womanist theology dismantles patriarchy, unmutes the woman’s voice, liberates her, and redefines an epistemology that is healing, restorative, and transformative. Readers are invited to explore how her sass and womanish behavior were critical in her ministry of anointing and preparing Jesus for his impending burial. Jesus endorses and acts as a co-liberator in the woman’s freedom, declaring that her story would forever be remembered and retold.

Cross Exposure: Narrative Healthcare and Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon’s Womanist Theology of the Cross

This essay begins with a brief meditation on the meaning of “Good” Friday, the Christian day of remembrance of the torturous death of Jesus, then shifts to apply the multiplicity of meanings of the term “exposure” to the appendix in Dr. Cannon’s book Katie’s Canon. Dr. Cannon’s intensely personal narrative about her childhood becomes an invitation for readers to consider their own life stories, as demonstrated by a case study from a Narrative Healthcare workshop. While womanist theology has identified problematic aspects in the tradition of Christian theology about the cross, the claim here is that “cross exposure” between the disciplines of womanist theology and Narrative Healthcare leads to understanding the cross as an act of “at-one-moment” by the Trinity, which allows individuals to affirm themselves in the larger story of redemption. This application of the interdisciplinary, collaborative nature of womanist studies is offered in memory of Dr. Cannon by a former student.

Theology and Race

This study develops a Christian theological response to the problems of race and anti-black racism in conversation with black theology and womanist theology. It provides a detailed introduction to multiple voices, developments, and tensions in these two theological traditions over the last half century. It offers an overview of James Cone’s arguments and their reception. It considers turns toward pragmatism and genealogy in black religious scholarship, focusing on Cornel West, Peter Paris, Dwight Hopkins, Victor Anderson, Anthony Pinn, Bryan Massingale, J. Kameron Carter, and Willie Jennings. It analyzes womanist theological treatments of intersectionality, narrative, and embodiment through Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kelly Brown Douglas, Diana Hayes, and M. Shawn Copeland. Finally, it suggests some open questions related to hybridity, sexuality, and ecology. Ultimately, it argues that the credibility of Christian theological witness depends significantly on the quality of Christian theology’s response to anti-black racism.

Black Theologies

Black theology burst onto the scene in the late 1960s as a new cohort of progressive African American clergy and seminarians responded to the imperative of a burgeoning black freedom movement and global anticolonial struggles. Taken collectively, their work championed a distinctive black theological tradition, birthed in the context of enslavement and transmitted through independent black churches, which placed primacy on God’s preferential and emancipatory activity on behalf of the poor and oppressed. This chapter traces the origins, development, and legacy of black theology over three consecutive generations, identifying important debates related to the discipline’s defining motifs, methods, and approaches as well as the emergence of alternative paradigms, including womanist theology and African American humanism.

Theologies of Liberation

King’s radicalism was hard to see or remember after he was assassinated and a campaign for a King Holiday transpired. It became hard to remember that he was the most hated person in America during his lifetime. The black social gospel became more institutional and conventionally political after the King era; liberation theology grew out of the Black Power movement; and womanist theology grew out of black theology.