#68 With Prof. Melanie Harris of Black Feminist and Womanist Theologies on Ecowomanism and Earth Honoring Faiths: "What does the Divine intend for all of humanity?"

On today’s episode I speak with Prof. Melanie Harris, Professor of Black Feminist and Womanist Theologies jointly appointed with African American Studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. A graduate of the Harvard Leadership Program, Dr. Harris earned her PhD. and M.A. degrees from New York’s Union Theological Seminary, her M. Div. from Iliff School of Theology and a B.A. from Spelman College in Atlanta.She is a former broadcast journalist who worked as a news producer for ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates and is the author of Gifts of Virtue: Alice Walker and Womanist Ethics, and Ecowomanism: Earth Honoring Faiths. She tells us of her own family ecojourney to Colorado, her spiritual mother Alice Walker and relates to us Ecowomanism and the connections between theologies, the earth, and environmental justice in relationship to African American women in particular. “Womanist theology came from black seminary women looking for a term to express the theology of black women,” she explains. She then connects the theology of black women with a theology of the earth. “Justice for all is connected to environmental justice. The question is: What does the Divine intend for all of humanity and all of the earth?”When I asked her suggestions for us, she immediately responded: “Tell the story of Jesus well and truthfully. In truth, Jesus was a nonviolent person and deeply committed to compassion. She also recounts the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman and how it is important to recognize how Jesus modeled peace-giving and peace building in that conversation. “All of us are interwoven and interconnected,” she concludes. “We have to come back to our own peace, and the truth that we have to have buckets and buckets of forgiveness and compassion."."Find the spaces of hope for your spirit and nourish those spaces as much as possible. From now on, we need to seed peace from the time we wake up to the time we fall asleep.” Thank you Melanie Harris for your inspiration, education, and dedication to peace: listen in and be inspired!https://orbisbooks.com/products/ecowomanismbeatitudescenter.orgjohndear.orgfatherjohndear.substack.com