A Womanist Podcast for Womanish Women and Their Friends Engaged in Conversations about the Bible

“Womanist Bible Talk: A Podcast for Womanish Biblical Readers and their Friends ”

Team Members/Contributors

Vanessa L. Lovelace Lancaster Theological Seminary Contact Me

About this sabbatical grant for researchers

Black women’s bodies and Black women’s lives cannot be left separate from their readings of the Bible. That is a claim Gay L. Byron and I make in our volume Womanist Interpretations of the Bible: Expanding the Discourse (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016). Yet, over the past two centuries Black women often have not read the Bible with consideration for their bodies, experiences, cultural biases and interests. Womanist biblical interpretation is a hermeneutical approach that provides reading strategies that attend to these issues. However, the current womanist biblical literature, with the exception of monographs such as Just A Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (San Diego, CA: LuraMedia, 1988) and When Momma Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood from a Womanist Perspective by Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, are written for an academic audience and the jargon and content (and costs) are often inaccessible to many churched and non-church Black women and other women of color. Our first plan was to write a study guide to accompany the edited volume, similar to Weems and Crowder at the end of each chapter of their books. However, several peers informed me that they were not only having more success with digital media such as podcasts in reaching broader audiences, but also that podcasts were easy to produce. Thus, this project is to create a podcast series featuring interviews with the contributors to Womanist Interpretations of the Bible and other womanist biblical scholars breaking down the terms, methodological approaches, and stories of the ancient biblical women to make them relatable to the lived experiences of contemporary women. Through their engagement with the authors and the biblical women, my hope is that these women will be equipped with stories that will empower them in their personal lives, their relationships with other women in their circles, and increase their faith.