Editor’s Introduction

In the last several months, the Trump administration has scrutinized the holdings and programming of libraries and schools across the United States. This scrutiny has even reached some of the most prominent libraries in the country. In May 2025, President Trump fired Dr. Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American to serve as the Librarian of Congress. That same month, the Pentagon ordered the removal of books from military libraries that were tagged by search terms including affirmative action, anti-racism, diversity, transgender, and white privilege. At the Naval Academy, this triggered the removal of books related to the Holocaust, feminism, and civil rights, including Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. At a time when US government officials are attempting to ban books they deem unacceptable, this issue of the journal invites readers to draw lessons and insights from literature and sacred texts that can heal fissures, compel us to ethical action, and raise voices that are often silenced. The articles, essays, and conversations published here represent a wide range of topics, texts, geographic locations, and religious traditions. The authors convey the vital importance of producing and consuming texts that push us to create a better, more ethical future.

Each year, we honor submissions from authors with two types of awards. Scholars who are less than four years postgraduation are eligible for the Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza New Scholars Award (NSA). The Reverend Katie Geneva Cannon Award honors Cannon's legacy as a womanist scholar in religion by recognizing womanist scholarship and activism. This year we have two award-winning articles. The JFSR awards committee felt that both papers offer innovative and multidisciplinary engagements with literary works by women that examine belonging, memory, and loss.

Kimi Bryson-Reilly's article, "A Womanist Way Out: Reimagining God and Sexuality in Black Womens Fiction," won first place in both the New Scholar Award (NSA) and the Katie Geneva Cannon Award categories. In this essay, Bryson asks how evangelical Christianity functions in Black women's fiction. Reading Alice Walkers The Color Purple and two of Deeshaw Philyaw's short stories, she finds protagonists who struggle with the divinized patriarchy and heteronormative sexual ethics of evangelical Christianity. Ultimately, Bryson argues that Black women must take on the challenging but beautiful womanist work to leave evangelicalism. The awards committee felt that this paper is an excellent reflection of Dr. Cannon's scholarship in its wide-ranging conversations with other thinkers, multidisciplinary textual engagements, and creative thinking.

Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey's article, "Telling Her Story: Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink and Jewish Feminist Narrative," was also awarded first place in the NSA category. Ramsey reads Rachel Kadish's novel The Weight of Ink, a story that follows three characters across four centuries. Ramsey analyzes the relationships and ethical commitments that traverse the gaps between the living and dead, between text and life, and that ensure continuity without biological reproduction. In a poignant final section, Ramsey turns her attention to the ink itself as a form of feminist nonreproductive continuity. One of the characters in the book, Esther, writes with iron gall ink, which is formed out of a vegetational growth called oak galls. Ramsey writes that these galls are formed when insects deposit eggs into leaf buds and plant tissue, and the galls "shelter and feed the young through maturity . . . the ink's source is a literal 'dwelling' that protects and feeds a new generation" (41).

Following these award-winning articles is a Living It Out essay by Alexis Thomas, wherein she shares her own womanist work within Black church culture. Thomas traces her evolution from an eighteen-year-old who was captivated by Juanita Bynum's preaching to a woman in her thirties who was more aware of the ways that Bynum and others in the Black church shame and restrict Black women. She also discusses her experiences leading the 8-week Womanist Workshop, which she designed for Black women to discuss their own experiences in the church, to learn womanist theology, and to read Yolanda Pierce's In My Grandmother's House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit.

Next in our issue are two additional articles that highlight unsung voices and critical readings of texts. Aulia Simon Partogi Situmeang's essay, "Listening to the Audible Voices of Indonesian Postcolonial Feminist Theology," offers a way of hearing Indonesian Christian women's negotiations with colonial powers as feminist theological voices. Responding to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's provocative essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?," Situmeang argues that not only can these colonized voices speak, but they already are speaking. Unpacking the work of three Indonesian theologians, the author shows how postcolonial feminist theological voices negotiate multiple forms of oppression. In another essay that focuses on postcolonial Indonesian readings, Herman Arnolus Manoe revisits the parable of the ten bridesmaids in Matthew 25. Manoe reads this story through a postcolonial feminist lens and connects the oppression of the bridesmaids to the experiences of the victims of the Indonesian massacre, members of the Communist Party, and the women's organization Gerwani. Here again we see how critical readings of literature and texts can heal during particularly challenging historical moments.

After these essays we feature two conversations. In a Special Section we celebrate the achievements of PANAAWTM (Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry), a group started in 1984. Boyung Lee, Kwok Pui-lan, Mary Foskett, Lisa Asedillo, Lama Htoi San Lu, Septemmy E. Lakawa, Yuki Schwartz, and Nami Kim write about the history, mission, and growth of this intergenerational and transnational feminist movement. In her concluding essay, Kim offers an emphatic call for PANAAWTM-inspired theology to bring the hard work of the decolonizing theological imagination to the devastations of the current political and ecological moment. She calls for "a future of co-thriving at no one's expense" (131).

Finally, our issue ends with a conversation about Jennifer Bird's book, Marriage in the Bible: What Do the Texts Say? The five scholars engaging with Marriage in the Bible emphasize Bird's ability to "empower" readers-Jimmy Hoke uses this term explicitly-to think in different ways about marriage, kinship, sex, race, and gender in the Bible. In particular, they note the ways Bird distinguishes between what many people refer to as "marriage" today and the kin relationships that existed in the Bible. Like other contributions to this issue, this conversation highlights the resonance of historical texts for the contemporary context, noting how biblical texts have been used to advance popular ideas from the "trad wife" to the manosphere.

A Special Note in Closing

It is fitting that this issue celebrates and honors authors, literature, and a variety of texts because this issue marks Kate Ott's last issue as JFSR coeditor, a position she has held since 2018. During this time, she has shepherded countless articles, essays, and conversations to publication. Ott has also mentored (and will continue to mentor) three coeditors who were new to the job and several submissions editors. As Sarah Schwartzman Ramsey points out in her article, producing literature and scholarship is a feminist form of reproduction. Each issue of the journal is the result of many people coming together to produce something unique, critical, academically rigorous, and ethically motivated. We are all so grateful for Ott's labor and wish her peaceful years ahead without production deadlines and other editorial concerns.