By Angela D. Sims.
When I gathered around a table at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education (Union Presbyterian Seminary) the morning of Wednesday, September 11, 2002, in a graduate seminar in theological ethics with seven other colleagues, I could not have imagined how this experience would shape my sense of vocation and identity. In less than thirty minutes, the Reverend Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon employed what I came to recognize as one of her classic pedagogical strategies. Her invitation to each student to recall where we were on the day we learned of the terrorist attacks in New York City, the Pentagon, and a small township in Pennsylvania provided me with a glimpse of womanist adaptive conscientization. In retrospect, I came to understand how Cannon drew on her own experiences, particularly the academy, to debunk notions of bifurcation and to challenge systems that erroneously conflated genius with a capacity to memorize and recall on demand.
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Want to read more? Click here for full (free) access to Sims’s reflection at JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.35.1.21.
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This piece originally appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Issue 35.1, Spring 2019.