Sisters in the Wilderness: A Discussion of the trailblazer Delores Williams with The Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas and Rev. Dr. Gabriella Lettini

Featuring The Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas and Rev. Dr. Gabriella Lettini. The conversation was  moderated by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis.

Delores S. Williams was a trailblazer and a founder of womanist theology. Over her life, she wrote several essays, articles, and book chapters that helped establish womanist theology, which she defined in Sisters in the Wilderness as theology that takes the “faith, thought, and struggle of Black women seriously as a ‘primary theological source.’” She earned a doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in 1991, where she later became the first Black woman to hold a named chair at the school as the Tillich professor of theology and culture.

Williams wrote that womanist theology joined Black male liberation theology in its call for the freedom of all human beings and joined white feminist theology in its assertion of women’s dignity. Womanism critiqued white racist oppression, but it also identified and critiqued Black male oppression of Black females, and white feminist theology’s “participation in the perpetuation of white supremacy,”