Editors’ Introduction

It has been the practice of the editors over the years to take turns drafting the introduction to each issue, for the nondrafter to then edit the first draft, and for the introduction to be published as the work of both. In this case, however, I, Judith, am very aware that this is the last introduction I will write. By the time this issue appears, I will have stepped down as coeditor of the JFSR to be replaced by Elizabeth Pritchard of Bowdoin College. This transition marks a very important moment for the journal in that it will be the first time in its thirty-plus years that neither Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza nor I, the two founding editors, will be a coeditor. One might say that the journal has come of age. With a long history now behind it, Indiana University Press as publisher, and an excellent production team in place, it is possible to move into a regular rotation of coeditors with the assurance of stability. It is no accident that the new coeditor with Traci West, Elizabeth Pritchard, was the second managing editor of the JFSR, serving in that role from 1992 through 1998 while a doctoral student at Harvard. After Elizabeth received her degree, she joined the editorial board and has been Religion and Politics editor for the last several years. The JFSR has been blessed with a succession of talented and deeply committed managing (now called submissions) editors who feel a stake in the journal’s future, and the position has been an important incubator for the next generation of leadership.

The JFSR experienced another transition this fall when Christy Cobb stepped down as submissions editor after three years. We bid Christy a sad farewell in the last issue, and in this one we welcome Susan Woolever, a doctoral student at Drew University, who took over the position at the end of summer 2015. In my last months as coeditor, it has been a pleasure working with yet another young scholar who understands and is committed to the mission of the journal.

I am gratified as I pass the editorship into other hands that this issue so well represents JFSR’s founding vision of having two communities of accountability: the academy and the feminist/womanist movement. Traci and I were very concerned that at this moment of continuing and seemingly uncontrollable police violence, ugly race-baiting by Republican presidential candidates, and heightened discussion of race in the United States that we give some serious attention to race and racism in this issue. We are delighted, therefore, to be able to publish a roundtable on “Women of Color in the Religious Studies Classroom: Silent Scripts and Contested Spaces,” which emerged out of a Wabash Center teaching consultation in 2008. The lead-in piece by Melanie Harris, Carolyn Medine, and Helen Rhee focuses on the classroom as a microcosm of power dynamics in the larger society. In a culture in which no one escapes indoctrination into white racist stereotypes, narratives, and practices, professors who are women of color find their authority questioned from the moment they walk into a room. They are subject to a host of conscious and unconscious, voiced and unvoiced assumptions about their competence, expertise, and bodily presence at the front of the classroom and must constantly respond to both overt and microaggressions. Scholars representing a range of different social locations and types of institutions respond to the lead piece, connecting contemporary classroom dynamics to the long historical trajectory of white supremacy, discussing the forms student antagonism takes with faculty members of different ethnic groups, providing a global dimension to the conversation, and raising critical questions about the responsibilities of faculty members teaching religious studies in the “imperial university.”

Several articles in the issue also locate themselves at the intersection between feminist theory and analysis and contemporary social struggles. L. Juliana Claassens’s article on “the Good Wife” in the book of Proverbs asks what circumstances might allow women in communities all around the world to both survive and thrive. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum’s list of capabilities necessary to a good life, she...