Traci C. West is a scholar and activist. She is the James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School and Professor Extraorinarius in the Institute for Gender Studies in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa. [1] She is the author of numerous articles on gender, racial, and sexuality justice. [2] [3] Her notable books include Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence (New York University Press, 2019), [4] [5] Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter (Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), [6] Our Family Values: Same-sex Marriage and Religion, editor (Praeger Publishers, 2006), [7] and Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York University Press, 1999). [8] [9] She is an ordained elder in the New York Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC). [10] [11] Her scholarship and activism centers the voices of Queer, Transgender, and People of Color in the struggle for LGBTQIA equality in churches. [12] [13] She testified before the New Jersey state legislature in support of marriage equality and protested on behalf of LGBTQIA equality at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. West is outspoken against intimate partner violence against black women and coined the term "victim-survivor" in Wounds of the Spirit. [14] [15] She was featured in "No!" a documentary film on sexual violence against black women. [16] [17]
West has received numerous awards, most recently the UMC New York Annual Conference Methodist Federation for Social Action Gwen and C. Dale White Social Justice Award; [18] Auburn Seminary’s inaugural Walter Wink Scholar-Activist award, [19] and CONNECT: Safe Families Peaceful Communities Peace and Justice award.
Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.
Starhawk is an American feminist and author. She is known as a theorist of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism. In 2013, she was listed in Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.
Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as race, nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class. The term could also encompass other social phenomena which are not commonly understood as exemplifying identity politics, such as governmental migration policy that regulates mobility based on identities, or far-right nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic others. For this reason, Kurzwelly, Pérez and Spiegel, who discuss several possible definitions of the term, argue that it is an analytically imprecise concept.
Carol J. Adams is an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate. She is the author of several books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) and The Pornography of Meat (2004), focusing in particular on what she argues are the links between the oppression of women and that of non-human animals. She was inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2011.
Womanism is a term originating from the work of African American author Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother's Garden, denoting a movement within feminism, primarily championed by Black feminists. Walker coined the term "womanist" in the short story Coming Apart in 1979. Her initial use of the term evolved to envelop a spectrum of issues and perspectives facing black women and others.
Nature worship also called naturism or physiolatry is any of a variety of religious, spiritual and devotional practices that focus on the worship of the nature spirits considered to be behind the natural phenomena visible throughout nature. A nature deity can be in charge of nature, a place, a biotope, the biosphere, the cosmos, or the universe. Nature worship is often considered the primitive source of modern religious beliefs and can be found in pantheism, panentheism, deism, polytheism, animism, Taoism, totemism, Hinduism, shamanism, some theism and paganism including Wicca. Common to most forms of nature worship is a spiritual focus on the individual's connection and influence on some aspects of the natural world and reverence towards it. Due to their admiration of nature, the works of Edmund Spenser, Anthony Ashley-Cooper and Carl Linnaeus were viewed as nature worship.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
Garrett–Evangelical Theological Seminary (Garrett) is a private seminary and graduate school of theology related to the United Methodist Church and is ecumenical in spirit. It is located in Evanston, Illinois, on the campus of Northwestern University. The seminary offers master's- and doctoral-level degrees, as well as certificate, micro-credentialing, and lifelong learning programs. It has thousands of alumni serving in ministry, education, organizational leadership, and public service throughout the world.
Black feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism philosophy centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that [Black women's] liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because of our need as human persons for autonomy."
Catholic Theological Union (CTU) is a private Roman Catholic graduate school of theology in Chicago, Illinois. It is one of the largest Catholic graduate schools of theology in the English speaking world and trains men and women for lay and ordained ministry within the Catholic Church. CTU is run and staffed by religious and lay men and women. International students constitute nearly one third of the student body.
Religion of black Americans refers to the religious and spiritual practices of African Americans. Historians generally agree that the religious life of black Americans "forms the foundation of their community life". Before 1775 there was scattered evidence of organized religion among black people in the Thirteen Colonies. The Methodist and Baptist churches became much more active in the 1780s. Their growth was quite rapid for the next 150 years, until their membership included the majority of black Americans.
Katie Geneva Cannon was an American Christian theologian and ethicist associated with womanist theology and black theology. In 1974 she became the first African-American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (USA).
A variety of movements of feminist ideology have developed over the years. They vary in goals, strategies, and affiliations. They often overlap, and some feminists identify themselves with several branches of feminist thought.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Indigenous feminism is an intersectional theory and practice of feminism that focuses on decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, and human rights for Indigenous women and their families. The focus is to empower Indigenous women in the context of Indigenous cultural values and priorities, rather than mainstream, white, patriarchal ones. In this cultural perspective, it can be compared to womanism in the African-American communities.
Cecelia Cabaniss Saunders sometimes written as Cecilia Cabaniss Saunders, was an African-American civil rights leader, and executive director of the Harlem, New York YWCA. She is best known for working against racial discrimination in wartime employment during World War II, for broader work training and opportunities for African-American women, and against police violence in Harlem.
Beverly Jean Wildung Harrison (1932–2012) was an American Presbyterian feminist theologian whose work was foundational for the field of feminist Christian ethics. She taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City for 32 years.
Spiritual activism is a practice that brings together the otherworldly and inward-focused work of spirituality and the outwardly-focused work of activism. Spiritual activism asserts that these two practices are inseparable and calls for a recognition that the binaries of inward/outward, spiritual/material, and personal/political all form part of a larger interconnected whole between and among all living things. In an essay on queer Chicana feminist and theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa's reflections on spiritual activist practice, AnaLouise Keating states that "spiritual activism is spirituality for social change, spirituality that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and one's worlds."
Sa'diyya Shaikh is a South African scholar of Islam and feminist theory. She is a professor of religion at the University of Cape Town. Shaikh studies Sufism in relation to feminism and feminist theory. Shaikh is known for work on gender in Islam and 'Ibn Arabi.
Ecofeminism generally is based on the understanding that gender as a concept is the basis of the human-environment relationships. Studies suggest that there's a difference between men and women when it comes to how they treat nature, for instance, women are known to be more involved with environmentally friendly behaviors. Socially there's an important claim in the ecofeminism theoretical framework that the patriarchy is linked to discrimination against women and the degradation of the environment. In Canada the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Toxics in 2020 shows that ineffective environmental management and mismanagement of hazardous waste is affecting different age groups, genders, and socioeconomic status in different ways, while three years before that, Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2017 submitted another report, warning the government about how the exposure to environmental hazards is a different experience for minorities in Canada. There have been ecofeminist movements for decades all over Canada such as Mother's Milk Project, protests against Uranium mining in Nova Scotia, and the Clayoquot Sound Peace Camp. Ecofeminism has also appeared as a concept in the media, such as books, publications, movies, and documentaries such as the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood and Fury for the Sound: the women at Clayoquot by Shelley Wine. Ecofeminism in the Canadian context has been subject to criticism, especially by the Indigenous communities as they call it cultural appropriation, non-inclusive, and inherent in colonial worldviews and structures.