Scan barcode
A review by moreteamorecats
Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk by Delores S. Williams
3.0
Objectively, this is a pathbreaking book. We wouldn't have womanist theology in its current form without this book. The theological academy has taken up some of Williams' major moves enthusiastically, even as it has tended to sideline younger womanist theologians. At the same time, like so many pathbreaking books, this one has at least as many blind alleys as fruitful new courses. Though consistently interesting and always (need one add?) suffused by a bracing moral clarity, this book lacks the monographic specificity that helps other revoultionary works feel constantly fresh.
For my purposes, Williams' theological method and hermeneutics are her most intriguing contributions. Theology had been in conversation with philosophy and politics for ages, but womanist theology marked the first time in generations that a theological movement took so many of its cues from a literary movement. (What precedent, if any, would we choose? Late Renaissance humanism and its impact on the Reformers? Even that was less direct.) The use of literature as a privileged theological source for Black women's experience would grow more sophisticated, but the basic pattern is already there in Williams.
What to make, then, of something like her careful retrieval of the category "genocide" and the postwar efforts of Black radicals to charge the United States with it? The historical work here is very strong, paralleling Samantha Power's work in [b:A Problem from Hell|368731|A Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide|Samantha Power|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174179182s/368731.jpg|118565] but fifteen years earlier; the moral case, likewise, is compelling. Why make that case in this particular book? What are readers, even those won over by (say) the Hagar/Sarah material, to make of it? Its importance to Williams is obvious. There would be an amazing article, and probably a good solid book, behind the research for that chapter; but why bring it up with so little argumentative or theoretical follow-through?
When assigned (as it often is) as a founding or representative text of womanist theology, I think, this book is not likely to be read on its own terms. Its arresting, strange intensity demand attention, but the payoff remains elusive, at least between its own covers. The moves, tropes, and themes Williams surfaces in this book have proven themselves invaluable and even necessary. Perhaps it is only in comparison to them that the book itself comes off, to me, as disappointing.
For my purposes, Williams' theological method and hermeneutics are her most intriguing contributions. Theology had been in conversation with philosophy and politics for ages, but womanist theology marked the first time in generations that a theological movement took so many of its cues from a literary movement. (What precedent, if any, would we choose? Late Renaissance humanism and its impact on the Reformers? Even that was less direct.) The use of literature as a privileged theological source for Black women's experience would grow more sophisticated, but the basic pattern is already there in Williams.
What to make, then, of something like her careful retrieval of the category "genocide" and the postwar efforts of Black radicals to charge the United States with it? The historical work here is very strong, paralleling Samantha Power's work in [b:A Problem from Hell|368731|A Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide|Samantha Power|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174179182s/368731.jpg|118565] but fifteen years earlier; the moral case, likewise, is compelling. Why make that case in this particular book? What are readers, even those won over by (say) the Hagar/Sarah material, to make of it? Its importance to Williams is obvious. There would be an amazing article, and probably a good solid book, behind the research for that chapter; but why bring it up with so little argumentative or theoretical follow-through?
When assigned (as it often is) as a founding or representative text of womanist theology, I think, this book is not likely to be read on its own terms. Its arresting, strange intensity demand attention, but the payoff remains elusive, at least between its own covers. The moves, tropes, and themes Williams surfaces in this book have proven themselves invaluable and even necessary. Perhaps it is only in comparison to them that the book itself comes off, to me, as disappointing.