Womanist Theology And Empire Essay

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Womanist Theology and Empire While setting the foundations of Womanist theology, it is important to lay out the context for my Womanist theological project in understanding police violence towards Black women. In this section, I will lay out what Empire is, unpack the notion of Black women as secondary victims to violence, the paradox of Black motherhood as violence, and Black mother’s resistance to the violence of Empire. The term Empire encompasses the different projects of oppression and disembodiment which are employed through state sanctioning in the time of Jesus of Nazareth and the United States. The term Empire comes from the theology of Richard Horsley, whose text, Jesus and Empire, helps us to envision Jesus’s strategic politic and his relationship with the Roman order. Horsley contends Jesus performing the kingdom of God was direct, deliberate, and confrontational to the oppressive injustices of the Roman Empire. Beyond Jesus being a religious figure, Horsley contends Jesus is political and therefore has bearing on what it means for Christians to be “Christ-like”. This directly critiques two dominant understandings of Jesus (1) which reconstruct Jesus as purely a religious figure through the assumption …show more content…

Throughout the scripture, Hagar only speaks when she pleads with God to not witness the death of her son. Yet, if we attend to her actions, although she does speak, her actions are consistently directed towards others. Namely, her actions are directed toward the survival of her son, not of herself. God provides a well of water for survival and Hagar’s immediate instinct is to provide for her son rather than herself. While some may simply reduce this story to one of the nurturing capacity of mother, they have missed deeper truths. Even if Hagar is a force of motherly care and nurture, we only attend to her offspring and never to Hagar

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