Editors' Introduction

The contributors to this volume draw our attention, again and again, to scenes of women working: making bread, caring for children, reconstructing language and building worlds, listening to students, mentoring colleagues, mobilizing citizens, writing that book. So much of this labor remains invisible, undercompensated, and exploited. Feminist and womanist scholarship is the work of correcting these injustices—it too can seem endless, thankless, and never-more-urgent. This is our work, in which, as Oluwatomisin Oredein reminds us in this issue, there is no true security. And, still we work. At this very moment, you are working. We work without certainty about where we are headed but with certainty that the path will be difficult and with the longing to see and hear and salute each other along the way.

This issue opens with our two Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award–winning essays, both of which point to the ways in which patriarchy and antiblack racism are sustained through the repetition of key concepts and images. Darrius D'wayne Hills assembles a critique of the persistence of the "Mammy" trope as disciplinary regime for black women faculty in higher education. In this regime, black women faculty members are expected to continuously serve the interests of others at their own expense. They are to provide the invisible and unrewarded labor of mentoring high numbers of students of color while reassuring white students and faculty of their fundamental righteousness. Hills is careful to credit the womanist scholars upon whom his analysis relies and to challenge his fellow black male faculty members to acknowledge their complicity in this arrangement and to work for justice alongside and in conversation with black women faculty and administrators. Zachary Thomas Settle deploys Judith Butler's theory of discursive performativity in order to illuminate Mary Daly's "linguistic labors"—that is, her efforts to intervene and disrupt the logics and structures of patriarchal discourse. For Settle, Daly's work not only anticipated later theorists of discursive materialization and subjection but also remains salient as a guide for learning to theologize beyond patriarchy.

The article section concludes with In-Hee Park's sustained study of the role of metonymy in Q, the oral and textual source for what became the synoptic gospels of the "New Testament" of the Christian scriptures. For Park, Q is replete with images of women at work: making bread, nurturing and protecting children, feeding and celebrating local communities, and singing songs to alleviate the daily strain of making a living. Moreover, Park insists that these images not only indicate women's role in producing Q but also represent a transformed and liberating vision of the basileia of God—a vision not of a masculinist warrior avenging his kingdom but of a parent's tender care, a comfortable home, a communal meal.

Hills's analysis in the articles section connects up with other sections in this issue that focus specifically on the work of feminist and womanist scholarship in relation to the classrooms and institutions of higher education in the contemporary U.S. context. Heather White's Across Generations interview of Rebecca Alpert captures the latter's continued risk-taking (coming out as a lesbian, studying for the rabbinate, critiquing Israel) and her sustained commitment to pedagogies that seek to confront and contextualize racism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, patriarchy, and homophobia without rendering students defensive and hostile.

A number of Alpert's themes are taken up and elaborated by the contributors to our Short Takes section entitled "Trumpism in the Classroom." Like Alpert, Samuel Hayim Brody urges careful preparation and the help of campus experts in order to effectively guide students' discussion of the broader historical and contemporary contexts, which get distilled into recurrent episodes of violent hatred such as the mass shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018. Tat-siong Benny Liew counsels readers to resist the urge to become as strident and dogmatic as Trumpists and insists that we forgo certainty even as we aver the necessity and specificity of facts in our classrooms. Jenna Reinbold acknowledges the temptation to simply dismiss the "bad religion" of Trump-supporting Christians but reasons that giving in to this temptation...