Description
Book SynopsisTilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Interiority and Public Religion
Chapter 1: Audre Lorde: “from the Gut of Blackness” A Black Lesbian Spirituality
Chapter 2: Visions of Self and Transformation in Black Outsider Art
Chapter 3: Black Women Living Religion in Cyberspace
Chapter 4: “Because I am a Woman” Vocation and Trauma in Alecia Brown Life
Chapter 5: Tilling Sacred Ground: Meditation on Ritual and Resistance
