Amidst the joy of celebrating the coming of the Child at Christmas, many of us are caught up in the bustle of holiday travels, shopping sprees, and plans to serve those less fortunate.
Culture Watch
Cheryl J. Sanders 8-01-1994
Three books recently published by Orbis Books together represent a major breakthrough in African-American women’s theological scholarship. Each is a first of sorts—Delores Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness is the first book-length womanist theology, Kelly Brown Douglas’ The Black Christ is the first womanist christology focused upon the black Christ image and idea, and Emilie Townes’ anthology, A Troubling in My Soul, is the first published collection of writings by womanist theological scholars.
The three books have as their common point of departure the womanist idea, a creation of writer Alice Walker who coined the term in the preface to her 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanist means black feminist, and a growing number of black women religious scholars are appropriating this concept for their own work. It appeals especially to black women who do not wish to be identified along with black men as black theologians, or who see themselves as different from the white women who are feminist theologians. Thus, womanist theology has a distinctive identity of its own. And these three new books contribute mightily toward giving further shape and content to womanist theology as a body of religious scholarship.
Douglas’ The Black Christ essentially follows the approach developed by James Cone (beginning in 1969) to create a black theology rooted in the idea of a black Christ. She introduces the book with a biographical statement regarding her encounters with the black Christ through the faith of her grandmother and the thought of James Cone.
Arthur P. Boers 8-01-1994
When Tom Harpur says the medical establishment is sick, he is neither trite nor merely ironic. Harpur, a force to be reckoned with here in the Great White North, is worth hearing on both sides of the border. He is Canada’s most popular religious columnist and a television commentator; his books are often Canadian best sellers. This former Rhodes Scholar was previously an Anglican priest and New Testament seminary professor.
He says the medical establishment is ill, not just economically and bureaucratically, but because of over-reliance on a medical model that sees the body as merely a machine. The church is also sick unto death, as reflected in dwindling numbers and its overlooking of the mandate to heal.
Harpur cites the January 28, 1993 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine report that "a surprising 34 percent of Americans, or approximately 61 million people, used...unconventional therapies or forms of non-medical healing in 1990." Many of those people were well-educated and most did not tell their doctors that they resorted to acupuncture, chiropractors, homeopathy, massage, self-help groups, relaxation response, meditation, biofeedback, prayer, or laying-on of hands.
Yet Harpur told me: "Doctors are moving. They’ve been dealing first of all with body-as-machine and then psychosomatic body-and-mind (usually in a disapproving way, the negative effect of the mind on the body). Now they are realizing the positive effect of the mind as well....Then we’ll have a whole person again that we’re dealing with, rather than this truncated one."