RECU 70970/80970-045 WOMANIST THEOLOGY AND ETHICS COURSE PROSPECTUS INSTRUCTOR Name: Melanie C. Jones Email Address: [email protected] COURSE INFORMATION Course Semester: Spring 2018 Three (3) Semester hours Prerequisites: None COURSE DESCRIPTION Drawing from the Black idiomatic expression “you actin’ womanish,”1 novelist Alice Walker in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) penned the term “womanist” in efforts to name the distinctive political aims of Black women beyond a white feminist scope in the 1980s. From Walker’s four-part poetic framing, womanism birthed in religious studies as a critical approach to take seriously the lived experiences of Black women against multiple forces of oppression. This course engages the theoretical contributions of womanist scholarship of the 20th and 21st centuries to the discipline(s) of theology and ethics. The course explores womanist thought as a theo-ethical enterprise for dismantling multidimensional oppression at the critical crossways of identity and difference. Utilizing the core tenets of womanist theological ethics, students will interrogate the moral virtue(s) of the body, human flourishing, ecology, faith, love, justice, hope, and redemption. COURSE LEARNING OUTCOMES 1) To introduce the interreligious, spiritual, political, theological, and ethical dimensions of a womanist sacred worldview. 2) To mine the motherlode of primary womanist theological and ethical contributions from the 1980s to the present. 3) To investigate and employ research methods for constructive womanist theology and ethics including literary analysis, sociology of Black liberation, Black women's historiography, and Black popular culture. 4) To interpret, articulate, and construct original theo-ethical positions resource womanist theology and ethics. CLASS PROCEDURES Lectures, Readings, Class Participation, Analytic Paper, Final Presentation. 1 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 4. 1 REQUIRED TEXTS Cannon, Katie. Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. ISBN: 978- 0826410344; $8.00 Cannon, Katie, Emilie Townes, and Angela Sims. Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader. ISBN: 978-0664235376; $19.06 Coleman, Monica. Making a Way out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. ISBN: 978- 0800662936; $20.98 Douglas, Kelly Brown. What’s Faith Got to Do With It?: Black Bodies, Christian Souls. ISBN: 978-1570756092; $27.00 Grant, Jacquelyn. White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. ISBN: 978-1555403034; $33.56 Floyd-Thomas, Stacey et al. Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society. ISBN: 978-0814727539; $28.00 Harris, Melanie. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth Honoring Faiths. ISBN: 978-1626982017; $25.85 Lightsey, Pamela. Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology. ISBN: 978-1498206648; $17.98 Mitchem, Stephanie. Introducing Womanist Theology. ISBN: 978-1570754210; $18.70 Riggs, Marcia. Awake, Arise, and Act: A Womanist Call for Liberation. ISBN: 978-0829810097; $9.49 Terrell, JoAnne Marie. Power in the Blood?: The Cross in the African American Experience. ISBN: 978-1570752162; $25.00 Townes, Emilie. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. ISBN: 978-1403972736; $30.40 Turman, Eboni Marshall. Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church and the Council of Chalcedon. ISBN: 978-134947782; $34.99 Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist Godtalk. ISBN: 978- 1626980389; $22.62 Walker, Alice. The Color Purple: A Novel. ISBN: 978-0156028356; $6.71 RECOMMENDED TEXTS (students do not need to purchase, but may engage these writings as reference sources for course content and discussion) Alexander, Liz S. and Melanie C. Jones, et al. #MillennialWomanism. https://btpbase.org/millennialwomanism/. Cannon, Katie. Black Womanist Ethics. ISBN: 978-1597523738 Coleman, Monica. Ain’t I A Womanist, Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought. ISBN: 978-0800698768 Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being. ISBN: 978-0800662745 Day, Keri, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives. ISBN: 978-1137569424 Floyd-Thomas, Stacey. Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics. ISBN: 978- 0829815849 Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. ISBN: 978-0061120060 Phillips, Layli. The Womanist Reader: The First Quarter Century of Womanist Thought. ISBN: 978-0415954112 Townes, Emilie. In A Blaze of Glory: Spirituality as Social Witness. ISBN: 978-0687187577. 2 Townes, Emilie. A Troubling in My Soul: Perspectives on Evil and Suffering. ISBN: 978- 0883447833. Townes, Emilie. Embracing the Hope: Womanist Perspectives on Hope. ISBN: 978- 1570751400. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. ISBN: 978-0156028646 FILMS Journey to Liberation: The Legacy of Womanist Theology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjhtUGqFCWg. What Manner of Woman Is This? Documentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUlc6L1Z9-k. GRADING PROCEDURES (70970-045) * Weekly Oral Participation (in class) 10% Social Strata Inventory 10% Diasporic Literary Journal 20% Class Presentation 30% Analytic Essay (12-15 pages) 30% GRADING PROCEDURES (80970-045) Weekly Oral Participation (in class) 10% Social Strata Inventory 10% Diasporic Literary Journal 20% Class Presentation 30% Constructive Theo-ethical Credo (15-18 pages) 30% * Grading Procedures are subject to change. Final grading procedures are set forth on the first day of class with the syllabus. 3 .