Introduction

Abstract

During my third year as an undergraduate in 1997, reading Systematic Theology and Philosophy at a British university, I spent a year as an international exchange student in Canada. One of my classes, taken in the autumn semester, was in feminist theology. Even though I was three-quarters of the way through my degree, this was my first, formal instruction in feminism of any discipline, and the first time I had been taught by a woman. In the opening class, the seminar reading was an extract from womanist writer and activist Alice Walker’s (1991 [1983]) epistolary novel, The Color Purple. The protagonist, Celie, a 14-year-old black girl living in the American South, writes letters to God, and later to her sister Nettie about her life, and mistreatment by Alphonso, the man she lives with and believes to be her father. While the novel is known for addressing racial, sexual, and economic violence against women, it also features heavily in feminist theological writings, and has been named by Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ as the most commonly cited feminist “theological text” (1989b, p. 5).