Dear Colleagues,

Despite historical and contemporary systemic efforts to limit or prohibit Black people’s access to literacy, knowledge, or high-quality affordable formal education, and to prevent or restrict their presence in higher education institutions or their contributions to ‘flagship’ publications as producers of knowledge, Black women have never wholly capitulated to resilient ideologies of white superiority and dominant attempts to define and control what constitutes legitimate epistemologies. Black women have a long oppositional and creative history as embodied producers of necessary cultural sacred knowledge. Sojourner Truth compared biblical narratives as read to her by children with “the witness within her” to produce her own interpretations/epistemology (Slave Narratives, 648). Through stories, storytelling traditions, and the retelling, reinterpretation, or reimagining of stories (both fiction and nonfiction), as oral events and written narratives, Black women create bodies of life-giving knowledge for survival, resilience, liberation, justice, and wholeness. Womanist ethicist Katie Cannon named it “epistemological gumption.” Epistemological gumption is “embodied medicated knowledge” that is “grounded in the everyday world of real lived experiences.” A source of Black women’s embodied cultural ‘epistemological gumption’ is sometimes identified as God’s direct revelation. The nineteenth-century preaching woman Old Elizabeth recalled this conversation with a white man: “he said, ‘you think you have these things by revelation, but there has been no such thing as revelation since Christ’s ascension.’ I asked him where the apostle John got his revelation while he was in the isle of Patmos” (Old Elizabeth, Memoir, 18).

This Special Issue “Against the Whitened Grain: Black women’s Stories, Religious Texts, and ‘epistemological Gumption’ Toward Liberation and Wholeness” invites essays from religious and/or womanist, Black feminist, and Black queer scholars in various disciplines that center Black women’s cultural stories (nonfiction or fiction, e.g., 13^th: From Slave to Criminal with One Amendment, When They See Us, The Color Purple, Parable of the Sower, Bridgerton) or storytellers (e.g., Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Elizabeth Acevedo, Ava Duvernay, Shonda Rhimes, Maya Angelou, Pearl Cleage, Terry McMillan, Sadequa Johnson, Renita Weems, Linda Brent, Delores Williams, and Black grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and sisters). Significant questions include the following: How do cultural stories produce oppositional, life-giving, and sustaining knowledge? What are the historical contexts from which these stories/storytellers emerge? What is the social impact of their stories and the contexts on their stories? How are stories/storytellers disruptive of dominant epistemologies, intersectional injustice, and whiteness? How do cultural stories invoke, reinterpret, or dissent from biblical or theological narratives, canons, and ethics?

We welcome essays that employ cultural stories as epistemological conversation partners for critically rereading or disrupting biblical narratives for freedom.

Dr. Mitzi J. Smith
Dr. Renita J. Weems
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• cultural stories
• Black women’s epistemologies
• womanist theology
• womanism and Black feminism
• womanist interpretation
• biblical interpretation
• whiteness studies