Women, Writing, Theology: Transforming a Tradition of Exclusion

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The seeds of this project originated a decade ago, when many of the contributors were graduate students at Emory University. Inspired by the Italian feminist practice of entrustment (affidamento), in which women mentor and assist one another “in full recognition of the disparity that may exist between them in class or social position, age, level of education, professional status, [and] income,”1 women graduate students and professors at various stages in their careers gathered to support one another’s theological work. Across differences of national origin and language, ethnicity and race, denominational affiliation, age, sexual orientation, and partner or parenting status, we met to talk, eat, and present works in progress. The particularity of our lives shaped our theological perspectives and our writing. Our differences in power and experience allowed us to mentor one another in navigating the hurdles of graduate school and in finding a theological voice as a woman in the academy. This mutual writing support continued after graduation from Emory and our scattering to various other institutions. We convened a panel on “Women, Writing, Theology” at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion in 2008, where the ix idea for a published volume first emerged, and we would like to thank the organizers, participants, and audience of that session for the lively and moving discussion of women’s theological writing that took place that day. The Louisville Institute generously sponsored a three-day consultation of the contributors in 2009 as additional authors joined the project. We are grateful to the Louisville Institute for their generosity, foresight, and support of women’s theological writing. We extend gratitude to our editor at Baylor University Press, Nicole Smith Murphy, for her skill and advocacy for this collection. The Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University provided the intellectual home and theological formation for much of the work that appears in this volume. We would like to thank friends and colleagues from Emory whose intellectual spirit informs this work, especially Melissa Johnston, Kent Brintnall, Ian Curran, Nevell Owens, Dirk Lange, Joy McDougall, Dianne Diakité, Walt Lowe, and Don Saliers, among many others. We are especially grateful to Mark D. Jordan for gently but persistently raising the question of writing, its form and function, in the history of theology and in our own theological efforts. Wesley Barker and Mari Kim deserve special mention as fellow women writing theology. Their friendship, insight, and contributions were essential to this book’s development. Without the collegiality of Emory’s Theological Studies program, evidenced in endless Stammtisch conversations, this volume would not be possible. Because all the contributors to this volume have been affiliated with the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, the question naturally arises: is there an Emory school of theology, a common approach that is reflected in the work of the women and men who emerge from its programs? Many theological schools share a common methodology, but that is not true of Emory. Nor does Emory have a common set of answers. Rather, if anything, it has a set of questions, one of which, for each of us in different ways, was the question of writing—critical reflection on how we write theology. Writing, naturally, emerges from reading, and we are especially grateful to our mentors for teaching us to read from a very wide canon, including texts not always recognizable x / Women, Writing, Theology as theological, both within the Christian tradition (such as the mystics) and outside the tradition (such as literary theory or other sacred texts) through interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and comparative work. We were encouraged to engage the Christian tradition with a generosity of spirit, to forego facile criticism in favor of retrieval and construction. Embodiment, religious practices, and beliefs, the various ways personal religious commitment informs academic theology, were all taken seriously . And a feminist and womanist sensibility was well integrated into the theological curriculum at every level. These qualities—the effects of theological formation at Emory—are reflected in the essays that follow. Much of the editorial work on this volume was done with my (Emily’s) newborn, Jacob, on my lap and at my breast. I am grateful for the support of Paul, Dominic, and Jacob, who remind me that women’s theological writing is but one embodied piece of the larger texture of life. Acknowledgments / xi ...