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Bleeding and Bold: A Womanist Theology of Reproductive Justice and Dangerous Epistemology
Introduction The Gospel narrative of the hemorrhaging woman (Mark 5:25-34) has long been interpreted as a story of individual healing and faith. Yet when read through a womanist theological lens, her twelve-year struggle with medical exploitation and her clandestine act of self-healing reveals significant insights for contemporary reproductive justice discourse. This woman’s embodied resistance—knowing in her body that she is healed (v. 29) yet fearing discovery—represents what I term covert bodily reclamation through embodied knowledge. Her touch becomes a form of “silent sass,” a dangerous act of knowledge production that challenges medical authority and patriarchal control over women’s reproductive capacity. For Black women in 19th Century America, reproductive discourse was…
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Problematizing Whiteness in Religious Scholarship: A Call for Racial Justice
Introduction A recent Twitter thread asked users to “Watch Whiteness Work” by pointing out examples of White Privilege [1] across various contexts (Husky 2023). This raises important questions for religious scholarship regarding whether our academic disciplines may also perpetuate systems of inequality [2] we ostensibly critique. As Christian ethicists and theologians concerned with justice and righteousness, how might our scholarship be vulnerable to racial bias? The study of religion and theology within higher education is responsible for confronting internalized racism within its canon and methods. As womanist scholar Emilie Townes notes, appeals to the Bible and doctrine often supplied the ideological justifications for systems of slavery, segregation, and other evils propagated upon…
