Delores S. Williams

Womanist and feminist theologians and biblical scholars have done considerable work to remind us of the need to pay attention to these intersections.

As Delores Williams explains in her pioneering text, Sisters in the Wilderness, "Womanist theology challenges all oppressive forces impeding Black women's survival and quality of life, including those based on race, sex, class, sexual preference, physical disability, and caste." Womanists challenge the norms of theological and biblical tradition which ignore the concerns of women, but especially those women who are marginalized in our societies as well as in the church.

They focus on Black women who, along with women of color more broadly, face gender as well as racial and wider forms of discrimination and oppression.

Womanists, in keeping with Black feminist tradition, recognize that race is deeply intertwined with notions of what it is to be a woman, so too the question of class.

But in your blog, um, you talk of the enslaved women, and you talk about womanist theology, which adds an important intersectional lens to the Pentecost story especially.

I'm wondering, how has engaging with womanist scholars such as Delores Williams shaped your own understanding of scripture and of church leadership?

I have just loved getting to know womanist scholarship.

This is a tradition developed by Black women who are thinking very critically about how questions of gender but also race, class, broader issues, even ecological issues sometimes, are playing out in kind of biblical texts, in theology, in Christian ethics.

Mm.

So we need to look to those people, um, to see what we might learn about God and God's ways with us.

And Delores Williams' book, Sisters in the Wilderness, is a perfect example of this because she elevates Hagar in the biblical text in Genesis, who is somebody who I only ever heard mentioned as a kind of collateral damage in the story of Abraham and Sarah's pursuit of this divine promise.

And I've heard the story preached so many times as a story of Abraham's disobedience in sleeping with Hagar to have a baby when he should have waited for Sarah, who was older, to have a baby, and it becomes a very kind of a question of personal faithfulness and impatience and waiting on the divine promise.