Mary Shawn Copeland

* Harvests insights of black women's historical experience for theology * Rethinks what it means to be human in light of African American experience

Body, Race, and Being

Enfleshing Freedom

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Feminist Theology in Different Contexts

Henriette Delille was born into a nineteenth-century American society that condoned the attitude that women of color existed for white male use whether they were enslaved or free. Repudiating prevailing societal norms and customs, Delille founded a religious congregation, the Sisters of the Holy Family, for free women of color, and thereby asserted black women as fully capable of chastity and of possessing, choosing; and disposing of themselves and their own bodies. Delille's vision challenged commonly held readings of those bodies; contravened slavery's vicious stereotypes of black women as impious, promiscuous, and lewd; and constructed an alternative to Louisiana's system of placage, or concubinage between a white man and a free black woman. Drawing on her own research as well as a range of historical and theological resources, Shawn Copeland paints a compelling portrait of an intrepid woman who is being considered for elevation to sainthood in the Catholic Church.

Mary Shawn Copeland

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