If you find your way to Dorchester Presbyterian Church outside of Charleston, South Carolina, on Thursday, December 5, you can witness, and perhaps even participate in, the powerful impact of Black Presbyterian women.
Gone now more than four years, the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, one of the foremost educators in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the first Black woman ever ordained by a forebear denomination, lives on in the lives of the scholars whose work relies in no small part on what they learned from her.
White Christians who do the hard work of educating themselves and empathizing with the centuries of racial trauma their African American siblings have endured can produce hope and healing that’s badly needed, members of an online panel convened by Union Presbyterian Seminary said Tuesday.
Multiple pandemics over the past two years, including Covid and efforts to bring about racial justice in U.S. communities — even among communities of faith — have benefited from a black light that highlights and helps clean up the messes that justice-seeking activists are asking the church to work on.
Anytime two deans and a seminary president are gathered for conversation around “Womanist Herstory, Womanist Hope,” those privileged to listen in can count on a thoughtful and thought-provoking hour. Listen to their conversation, recorded last week, by clicking here.
Multiple pandemics over the last two years, including COVID-19 and efforts to bring about racial justice in U.S. communities — even among communities of faith — have benefitted from a blacklight that highlights and helps clean up the messes that justice-seeking activists are asking the church to work on.
“Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said during his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, capping the March on Washington.
Almost six decades later it’s well past time. But two leaders engaged mightily in the struggle said during Monday’s online forum “God and Division” hosted by the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership at Union Presbyterian Seminary said religion has a significant place in the battle.
Samantha “Foxx” Winship of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, wants to reshape the image of what it is to be a farmer and reclaim the practice of growing food as a source of empowerment for African Americans.
The Rev. Dr. Ted A. Smith, Professor of Preaching and Ethics in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, presented the fourth and final 2021 Sprunt Lecture Wednesday, hosted by Union Presbyterian Seminary. The final virtual lecture was followed by a Q&A session on the overall lecture theme “No Longer Shall they Teach One Another: The End of Theological Education.”
“There is a gift,” the Rev. Phanta Lansden said during an online panel discussion held Tuesday, “in having womanist theology that centralizes the Black woman’s experience as it merges into the biblical story.”
