By Cheryl Townsend Gilkes.
What started as a joke became our happy reality. Katie Geneva Cannon, author and creator of Black Womanist Ethics, “set it off.” Katie, Delores Williams, and I just happened to be together in Cambridge/Boston as this new way of thinking began. With our bureaucratic incursion, and with Kate’s and Delores’s prompting, we applied to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) to create the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Consultation. Doing that work together, Kate and I developed a label for our friendship and colleagueship. She was my bishop; I was her dean (because I filled out the forms). I did not truly appreciate the dynamics of our relationship until I watched a worship service at the National Cathedral and other places where bishops and deans worked together. I was happy to be Katie’s dean!
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Want to read more? Click here for full (free) access to Gilkes’s reflection at JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.35.1.13.
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This piece originally appeared in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Issue 35.1, Spring 2019.