Feminist Theology

The beginning of partnership in dialogue is "digging in your own garden," so that you know what gifts you can bring to the global table talk with your sisters and what parts of your life might be harmful to others. Once we have understood the oppressive and liberating social structures of our own reality more clearly, we are better able to understand the social structures that affect other people's lives. Then we are able to include those data in reflecting on the meaning of the Christian tradition and the clues for liberating action and celebration we find in dialogue with others.

The subtitle, Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective, comes from a course at Yale Divinity School where many of the lectures in the book were also shared. The process Katie Cannon and Letty Russell developed in the course for doing theology and ethics in a holistic way is described in Letty's chapter, "From Garden to Table." White women are included with women of color in the subtitle because all of us need to learn what feminist theology means to women from Third World countries and to women of color living in the United States . By listening to the voices of those who have been excluded, and beginning with their oppression and marginality, we may find a way to cultivate a global garden together.

Perhaps confession is good for more than the soul. It can be the means of remembering our inheritance, or lack thereof, and testing out, together with others, the ways that our parents' gardens may have been tended by the same hands and feet that trampled the gardens of Third World sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers. Such confession is truly difficult, but the sharing of garden stories may bear fruit for sharing around a global table where all are welcome. It may provide us with at least one way of picking up the agenda spelled out by Delores Williams in her article, "Women's Oppression and Lifeline Politics in Black Women's Religious Narratives." She speaks of the importance of relationships between women as a third aspect of women's experience, along with the experience of struggle and the experience of female body and culture. One of the tasks of feminist theology that she underlines is part of our agenda in this dialogue among white women and women of color.