Emilie Townes: Facing (In)Justice with the Power of Hope

Emilie M. Townes is an American Baptist clergywoman and native of Durham, North Carolina. She holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Religion in Society and Personality from Northwestern University. Townes is the Dean Emerita and the former University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and the College of Arts and Science, becoming the first African American to serve as Dean of the Divinity School in 2013. Townes has taught at numerous other institutions, including Yale Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, and Saint Paul School of Theology. She was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009 and served as the first Black woman of the American Academy of Religion in 2008. She also served a four-year term as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012 to 2016, and in 2025 is serving as the first Black woman President of the Society of Christian Ethics.

She is the editor and co-editor of numerous collections of essays, including A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering; Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation; Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life; Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, and Walking Through the Valley: Essays: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon. She has also authored Womanist Ethics, Womanist Hope, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care, and Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.  

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