Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (Semeia Studies) (Semeia Studies, 85)

Gay L. Byron and Vanessa Lovelace bring together scholars from the US, the Caribbean, and India in this collection of cross-generational and cross-cultural readings of the Bible and other sacred sources. Each article addresses contemporary topics, including the #BlackLivesMatter movement, domestic violence, and human trafficking, while at the same time uncovering the complicated portrayals of children, women, and other marginalized persons in biblical narratives. Contributors employ gender and feminist criticism, social-scientific methods, postcolonial and psychoanalytical theory, and hip-hop culture to reveal the inherently intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and class at work in womanist thought and analysis. Cheryl B. Anderson, Margaret Aymer, Valerie Bridgeman, Gay L. Byron, Stacy Davis, Wil Gafney, Bridgett A. Green, Sharon Jacob, Jennifer Kaalund, Vanessa Lovelace, Layli Maparyan, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Love L. Sechrest, Mitzi J. Smith, Shively T. J. Smith, Althea Spencer-Miller, Emilie M. Townes, and Marlene Underwood challenge interpreters from various disciplines to include new voices and bold, innovative interpretive approaches.

Features:

• Essays from a critical mass of scholars now engaged in the expanding area of womanist biblical interpretation
• Articles that apply interdisciplinary methods and perspectives
• Analysis of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Hindu scripture, and Ethiopic texts

Gay L. Byron is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of New Testament at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC. She is the author of Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (Routledge) and has written articles and essays dealing with gender, ethnicity, and early Ethiopian Christianity. Byron is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature Council and the Semeia Studies Editorial Board.

Vanessa Lovelace is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. She has been published in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies and in the Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center. Lovelace is co-chair of the Women in the Biblical World Unit of the Society of Biblical Literature.