The Purpose of Evil Was to Survive It: Black and Womanist Rejecting the Cross for Salvation

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Jamall A. Calloway
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Theological Thought ◽  
Traditional Understanding

Taking the Hagar story as the central biblical resource to address the particular plight of Black women—a plight that reckons with patriarchal and White supremacist forces that desire its enclosure—Delores Williams challenges both the traditional understanding of atonement theory which embraces the Cross as salvific and Black liberation theologies’ apocalyptical conceptions of a mighty liberating God. This article seeks to read Delores Williams closely to take seriously her theological development through literature more broadly and her soteriological critiques of the Cross specifically. A rereading of Williams will provide the grounds for continuing the debate of the Cross’s (in)significance within Black theological thought at large. Analyzing Williams’ soteriological critiques will allow me to offer a reading of the Cross that ultimately relies on Williams’ emphatic rejection. Such a rejection of the Cross is necessary for understanding how Black Christianity centers the Cross in order to reject it, as it is intended to be.

Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha A. Upton ◽  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Modern Movement

This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement of 1966–1974. The authors argue that Black women found new roles in new struggles during this period. The chapter ends with a look at the rise of radical Black feminism between 1974 and 1980, examining the codification of intersectional politics and discussing the continuation of issues of race, privilege, and diversity in contemporary feminism.

scholarly journals Birthing a New World

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63
Author(s):  
Marquita R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
The Face

This essay analyzes how James Baldwin’s late novel If Beale Street Could Talk represents Black women’s care work in the face of social death as an example of how Black women act as surrogates for Black liberation giving birth to a new world and possibilities of freedom for Black (male) people. Within the politics of Black nationalism, Black women were affective workers playing a vital role in the (re)creation of heteronormative family structures that formed the basis of Black liberation cohered by a belief in the power of patriarchy to make way for communal freedom. This essay demonstrates how Beale Street’s imagining of freedom centers not on what Black women do to support themselves or each other, but on the needs of the community at large, with embodied sacrifice as a presumed condition of such liberation.

Black Women’s Internationalism from the Age of Revolutions to World War I

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon R. Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
International Council ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Universal Negro Improvement Association ◽  
Global Consciousness

Black internationalism describes the political culture and intellectual practice forged in response to slavery, colonialism, and white imperialism. It is a historical and ongoing collective struggle against racial oppression rooted in global consciousness. While the expression of black internationalism has certainly changed across time and place, black liberation through collaboration has been and remains its ultimate goal. Since the emergence of black internationalism as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and during the Age of Revolutions, black women such as the poet Phyllis Wheatley and evangelist Rebecca Protten have been at its forefront. Their writings and activism espoused an Afro-diasporic, global consciousness and promoted the cause of universal emancipation. During the 19th century, black women internationalists included abolitionists, missionaries, and clubwomen. They built on the work of their predecessors while laying the foundations for succeeding black women internationalists in the early 20th century. By World War I, a new generation of black women activists and intellectuals remained crucial parts of the International Council of Women, an organization founded by white suffragists from the United States, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a global organization formally led by Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. But they also formed an independent organization, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR). Within and outside of the ICWDR, black women from Africa and the African Diaspora faced and challenged discrimination on the basis of their sex and race. Their activism and intellectual work set a powerful precedent for a subsequent wave of black internationalism shaped by self-avowed black feminists.

scholarly journals Black Religious Studies, Misogynoir, and the Matter of Breonna Taylor’s Death

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 621
Author(s):  
Ahmad Greene-Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Black Religion ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Central Claim

This article reflects on the matter of state-sanctioned death in Black religious studies, with the murder of Breonna Taylor as its central focus. It examines how scholars of Black religion engage with the issues of state-sanctioned murder, antiblackness, and misogynoir, and it endeavors to underscore ways for Black male* scholars of Black religion to respond to the religious experiences and deaths of Black women and Black people of all gendered experiences. This article’s central claim is that if Black male* scholars of Black religion continue to underscore how Black religion has been a catalyst for Black liberation without attention to how cisheteropatriarchy functions as antiblackness, then we ultimately will be unable to speak the name of Breonna Taylor in earnest.

scholarly journals Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist’

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-523
Author(s):  
Lisa Amanda Palmer
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Gendered Racism ◽  
Black British ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
Member Of Parliament

This article argues that it is remiss to understand the acute intensification of White supremacist politics in contemporary Britain without paying close attention to how this racism is inherently gendered and sexualised. This will be discussed in relation to the gendered racism of ‘misogynoir’ as experienced by the British Member of Parliament Diane Abbott. The article uses Shirley Anne Tate’s powerful analysis of the Sable-Saffron Venus in the English imaginary to argue that forms of British, and more explicitly English, national identity have been worked out on the back of systemic efforts to erase the material and epistemic presence of Black women in Britain from the British body politic. It further argues that the politics of erasure extends to the epistemic elision of Black British feminist theorising within the field of social theory. What then are the consequences and interplay of both the lived and epistemic acts of violence? I explore these issues by mapping Black British feminism’s anticolonial politics to argue that we should bring this tradition to bear in our analysis of this most recent iteration of racism in our contemporary times.

Reconciling the Cross in the Theologies of Edward Schillebeeckx and Ivone Gebara

2005 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 638-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen McManus
Keyword(s):  
Edward Schillebeeckx ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Fundamental Tension ◽  
Theological Thought ◽  
The Church

[The author explores areas of consonance and contrast in the backgrounds and methodologies of Edward Schillebeeckx and Ivone Gebara, especially as these are illumined in their respective approaches to the symbol of the cross. While both critique the ways that this central Christian symbol has functioned to contribute to oppression, they diverge in their views of its inherent redeemability. The juxtaposition of the thought of Schillebeeckx and Gebara on this issue reveals a fundamental tension in the Church and in theological thought today, even as it expresses a potentially unifying intuition.]

scholarly journals Living at the Margins: Black Feminist Pedagogy as Transformative Praxis During the 1980s-1990s and Epistemic Exclusion in the 21st Century—Where Do We Go Now?

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolana Mogadime
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Male ◽  
Feminist Pedagogy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Black Liberation Movement ◽  
Institutional Challenges ◽  
University Settings ◽  
Black Feminist Pedagogy

In this essay I argue that Black women who teach Black feminist pedagogy experience “epistemic exclusion” (Buchanan, 2020) while advocating for the intersections between three disparate contexts: their activism in their communities, the women’s movement, and their work as educators in postsecondary settings. The period examined is the 1980s–1990s. I consider the institutional challenges and limitations Black women have undergone as knowledge producers and teachers. While pushing the boundaries erected between university settings and the Black liberation movement taking place in their communities (Joseph, 2003), they were limited to a precarious status as Black women teaching within White-male dominated institutions. The trailblazing theoretical pedagogical insights Black feminists have advanced in their work as educators in postsecondary settings is discussed at length. Additionally, connections are made to the present-day struggle among Black feminists for inclusion within contemporary educational contexts (Evans-Winters & Piest, 2014; Mogadime, 2002, 2003; Wane, 2009, 2011).

Motherhood, Anti-Apartheid, and Pan-African Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
A Site ◽  
Black Motherhood

This chapter examines how the gendered language of motherhood informed black international connections between South Africa and the United States. It argues that global black motherhood – defined as a form of transnational maternalist politics based around the shared experiences of black women in white supremacist societies – shaped racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates how black women in the United States and South Africa transformed the domestic sphere into a site where citizenship claims could be made. By privileging their position within the home, as primary caregivers for the black family, they worked to stress the political significance of black motherhood in the global fight against white supremacy.

scholarly journals De creativiteit in de wereld en de werkelijkheid van God. De theologie van Gordon Kaufman in betrekking tot Wilhelm Herrmann en Rudolf Bultmann

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Benjamins
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Concept Of God ◽  
Rudolf Bultmann ◽  
The World ◽  
Hidden God ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Traditional Understanding

The creativity in the world and the reality of God. The theology of Gordon Kaufman in relation to Wilhelm Herrmann and Rudolf Bultmann. The article aims to defend the compatibility of Kaufman’s concept of a world grounded on immanent creativity and Bultmann’s concept of God who addresses us in the proclamation of the cross. Since Darwin’s natural selection it is hard to conceive of a universe that is designed and allows for the assumption of a creator. Theologians have grappled with the meaning of nature and history from the time their purposiveness was contested. Wilhelm Herrmann argued that we undergo a transforming goodness in our experiences of Jesus’ inner life which makes us confess that the goodness of a hidden God determines the world and makes us contribute to its development. We cannot prove the influence of God’s goodness, but we can experience it personally. Rudolf Bultmann radically changed this perspective. He argued that we are not placed in a meaningful world on behalf of Jesus’ inner life; instead, the proclamation of the cross liberates us from any worldview in order to live authentically. Gordon Kaufman proposes an understanding of God as the creativity in the world and its evolution without any dualism or supernaturalism. He denies a blueprint for creation but accepts a serendipitous creativity that can function as the basis for the articulation of our worldview and our orientation in the world. According to Kaufman, Bultmann still retains the dualistic presupposition of the traditional understanding of God. This article argues that the differences between Kaufman and Bultmann are limited, for whereas Bultmannn underlines the reality of God who addresses us in the proclamation of the cross and thereby recreates us, Kaufman wants to construct a worldview grounded on creativity. The creativity in the world and God’s (re)creative acts are not incompatible.

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