Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (Semeia Studies Book 85)

Engage the wide-ranging interests and distinctive insights womanist criticism brings to biblical interpretation

Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace bring together scholars from the US, the Caribbean, and India in this collection of cross-generational and cross-cultural readings of the Bible and other sacred sources. Each article addresses contemporary topics, including the #BlackLivesMatter movement, domestic violence, and human trafficking, while at the same time uncovering the complicated portrayals of children, women, and other marginalized persons in biblical narratives. Contributors employ gender and feminist criticism, social-scientific methods, postcolonial and psychoanalytical theory, and hip-hop culture to reveal the inherently intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and class at work in womanist thought and analysis. Cheryl B. Anderson, Margaret Aymer, Valerie Bridgeman, Gay L. Byron, Stacy Davis, Wil Gafney, Bridgett A. Green, Sharon Jacob, Jennifer Kaalund, Vanessa Lovelace, Layli Maparyan, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Love L. Sechrest, Mitzi J. Smith, Shively T. J. Smith, Althea Spencer-Miller, Emilie M. Townes, and Marlene Underwood challenge interpreters from various disciplines to include new voices and bold, innovative interpretive approaches.

Features

• Articles that apply interdisciplinary methods and perspectives


• Essays from a critical mass of scholars now engaged in the expanding area of womanist biblical interpretation


• Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Hindu scripture, and Ethiopic texts

Gay L. Byron is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of New Testament at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. Her publications include Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature and commentaries on the book of James in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary and the twentieth anniversary edition of the Women's Bible Commentary. Byron is a member of the SBL Council and the Semeia Studies Editorial Board.

Vanessa Lovelace is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. She is the author of “Religious Leaders: Hebrew Bible” in The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies Her research analyzes the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nation in the Hebrew Bible narratives through a womanist biblical hermeneutics. She is co-chair of the Women in the Biblical World Unit of the Society of Biblical Literature.