Tilling Sacred Grounds: Interiority, Black Women, and Religious Experience [Paperback]

Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black womens 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 womens interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black womens 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.Phillis Isabella Sheppard is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Associate Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion and the director of the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements.

Drawing on the work of Audre Lorde, womanist scholar Phillis Sheppard offers a compelling theological analysis of Black women's interior lives and their contributions to public discourse. The Christian Century

Tilling Sacred Grounds: Interiority, Black Women, and Religious Experience courageously explores and articulates the complexities of Black religion, Black womens spirituality, and sexuality, in private, communal, and public spaces. Phillis Sheppard beautifully engages a practical theology that draws with integrity on different disciplines and experience in crafting a scholarly work that is accessible and highly informative to any thoughtful reader. Emmanuel Y. Lartey, Candler School of Theology, Emory University

Tilling Sacred Grounds demonstrates Sheppards ability to push beyond Christian boundaries and engage in a necessary dialogue with other faith traditions in her reslc5