By Stephen G. Ray Jr.
I begin by noting that as with all biblical scholars—or better yet, writers of sacred scripture—Katie Cannon began her sacred discourses with the recitation of her table of ancestors. Specifically, with Mary Nance Lytle in Mecklenburg County in the state of North Carolina in the sometimes-divided United States of America.[1] Her genealogy began with a woman who, like the ancestors of Nana Peazant in the film Daughters of the Dust, “chose to survive” so that the tribes born of the family she pieced back together after slavery might have something with which to build a future.
…
Want to read more? Click here for full (free) access to Ray Jr.’s reflection at JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.35.1.19.
[1] Katie G. Cannon. “Surviving the Blight,” in Inheriting Our Mother’s Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective, ed. Letty M. Russell (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1988), 75.
Next to Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s “In Memory of Her“
Back to “Remembering Katie G. Cannon“
This piece originally appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Issue 35.1, Spring 2019.