Getting our Feet Wet: Close Reading with Womanist Eyes

Womanist is a noun referring to bodies of knowledge, ways of reading, and larger intellectual frameworks rooted in the perceptions, experiences and knowledge of black women – including ancestral and academic knowledge and cultural knowledge, folk knowledge, motherwit and the women’s ways of black women. This lecture will offer a close reading of a biblical text utilizing the methodology that characterize the approach known as 'womanist midrash'.

The Rev. Dr Wil Gafney, Ph.D. is a biblical scholar whose work focuses on translation of the scriptures for congregations and lay readers, womanist and feminist biblical interpretation and, women who prophesied in ancient Israel and the ancient Afro-Asiatic world and, their reception in rabbinic literature. She is the Right Rev. Sam B. Hulsey Professor of Hebrew Bible at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She is the author of A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church Years A, B and C and a novel Year W (a stand-alone volume) and, translator of its biblical selections. She is the author of Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to Women of the Torah and the Throne and its sequel, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to Women of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings along with a commentary on Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah in the Wisdom series and, Daughters of Miriam: Women Prophets in Ancient Israel. She co-edited The Peoples’ Bible and The Peoples’ Companion to the Bible.

Dr Gafney is an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Pennsylvania and licensed in the Diocese of Texas and, a former Army chaplain and congregational pastor in the AME Zion Church. A former member of the Dorshei Derekh Reconstructionist Minyan of the Germantown Jewish Center in Philadelphia, she has co-taught courses with and for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in Wyncote, PA. Her lectures and sermons are widely sought after in academic and Jewish and Christian congregational spaces in the US and in the UK. She is a public facing religious scholar, preacher, teacher, activist and an amateur watercolourist.