A Lamentation For Our Daughters

This is a wailing; and it shall be wailed. The women of the world shall wail it. Over Nubia and all its nations they shall wail it, says the SOVEREIGN God. Ezekiel 32:16 My Lament My eyes grieve continually for the souls of all the daughters who are raped. My eyes grieve continually for the...... Read More

Who Gives This Woman? Patriarchal Marriage

For many, marriage is a sacrament or a covenant given by God, an institution that is rooted in love and gives rise to more love through the interweaving of families and sometimes the nurture of children. For many of my conversation partners in the past three weeks, the notion that trafficked girls could be sold...... Read More

Trafficked into Marriage

Today black women in the United States and perhaps some of our allies are wearing geles, traditional West African head wraps like those worn in Nigeria to call attention to the hundreds of our daughters, kidnapped and sold like the Israelite daughters at Shiloh more than three thousand years ago. Some folk still have not...... Read More

Lessons From Passover: A Farewell Sermon

Open the doors of our hearts. Open the doors of our hearts to the word we would hear and the word we would not. Open the doors of our hearts. Open the doors of our hearts to those whom it is easy to love and those who it is not. Open the doors of our...... Read More

Raising the Walking and Rotting Dead

(A sermon remix.) Ezekiel sees zombies, the walking dead. Lazarus is wrapped up like a mummy. To the rotting dead and walking dead the living God speaks a living word: …hear the word of the Holy God…I will cause spirit-breath to come into you and you shall live. Let us pray: Open our eyes that...... Read More

Noah in Genesis, Enoch & White Imagination

Using sources in Genesis, the books of Enoch – which are scriptural in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – and his own interpretive imagination, Darren Aronofsky has given the world a new vision of the Noah story. His vision is eclipsed by its blinding whiteness, (see my take on his white savior saving a world full...... Read More

Black Like Me: Erased from the Noah Movie

I pay attention to the peopling of the world in the vision filmmakers. I want to know if there are people like me in their worlds, people of African descent, people of color. In Darren Aronofsky’s vision of Noah and his world I do not exist. People like me do not exist. Black, brown and...... Read More

Shalom Miryam, Hail Mary

A miracle happened today. We will see it in nine months on Christmas Day. In reflection an Annunciation sermon (from 2004). [On this day when people are arguing for the right to prevent women from accessing health services under the rubric of birth control (and abortion) because of their own religious biases, I am mindful...... Read More

Women of the Word: Women Prophets

2014 Susan Draper White Lectures at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, New Brighton, MN. The talk is based on my book Daughters of Miriam and previews the approach in my forthcoming book Womanist Midrash.... Read More

Having A Holy, Cranky, Lent

Dear People of God: The first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection…I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word… I usually...... Read More