Professor Townes’s teaching and general research interests focus on Christian ethics, womanist ethics, critical social theory, cultural theory and studies, as well as on postmodernism and social postmodernism. Her specific interests include health and health care; the cultural production of evil; analyzing the linkages among race, gender, class, and other forms of oppression; and developing a network between African American and Afro-Brazilian religious and secular leaders and community-based organizations. Among her many publications are Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness and Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health and a Womanist Ethic of Care; . Prior to her appointment at Vanderbilt as dean and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society, Professor Townes was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale Divinity School and the Carolyn Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2008 and is the current president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (2013-2016). Professor Townes is an ordained American Baptist clergywoman.
I’ve been thinking about and living through significant change these last few months. I prefer to think of it more as “transition” because change always seems to be such a mammoth undertaking. Change signals, for me, a willingness to pull up roots, move on to the largely unknown, try not to stumble in the process, […]
Though we know that it is impossible to make sense out of the senseless, we find ourselves doing so once again when faced with the massacre of 26 kids and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School here in Connecticut. Twenty of the victims are children who ranged from 5 years old to 10 years old. […]
Since the federal election last Tuesday, I have been scratching my head and trying to understand how 332 electoral college votes and 50.5% of the popular vote is now not a mandate (according to all persuasions of reporters) when in 2004 Bush garnered 286 electoral college votes and 50.7% and it was. Is the 0.2% […]
Growing up in the liberal segregated south of Durham, NC in the late 1950s and 1960s, one of the things that was drummed into little Black kids heads was the power and right of voting. From Civics classes to conversations in our homes to messages from stormy pulpits, we learned the story of the hard […]
On the morning of November 5, 2008, we gathered for our daily worship in Yale Divinity School’s Marquand Chapel. There was much joy and celebration in the air as almost all of those gathered felt a new day had dawned across America. I was doubtful. Perhaps it was the cranky ethicist in me peaking around […]
Much has been written about the Vatican’s recent censure of Margaret Farley’s 2006 book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. The high degree of denunciation of this censure has been thoughtful and heartening. Among the many things I find fascinating about the Vatican’s response (with it’s suspect timing) as Baptist observer has been […]
It no longer stings on Mother’s Day. My mother died in 2003 after a brief illness. My sister and two aunts surrounded her as we watched the monitors flat line while the breathing machine kept pumping false life into her. This was not the way she wished to go, and it was hard for my […]
I am trying to make sense of the installation art piece by the Black Swedish artist, Makode Aj Linde. As part of an art exhibit that focuses on female genital mutilation, Linde created a Venus Hottentot cake body for which he served as the head. Each time one of the attendees, largely White folks, cut […]
The recent Supreme Court ruling on ministerial exception potentially legalizes all manner of bad behavior on the part of religious institutions whose understanding of “all God’s children” is narrow, particular, and biased. First, by defining “minister” so broadly, the court allows religious institutions to declare any person who works within it’s doors and/or ministries as […]