Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas facts for kids

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (born 1969) is an American author and professor. She teaches about ethics and society at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Floyd-Thomas is a Womanist Christian social ethicist. This means she studies how religious ideas, especially Christian ones, connect with society and how people should act. Her work focuses on how people face challenges related to their race, social class, and gender. She looks at how religious beliefs can either help solve these problems or sometimes make them worse.

She is also the executive director of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Education and Mentors

Stacey Floyd-Thomas earned her Ph.D. (a high-level university degree) from Temple University in 1998. Her main teacher and guide there was Katie Geneva Cannon. Katie Cannon was a very important person in the field of Womanist ethics. She continued to guide and inspire Floyd-Thomas's work and teaching style.

Understanding Womanist Thought

In the 1960s and 1970s, the way people studied theology (the study of religious faith) changed a lot. This was due to the rise of black theology, especially the ideas of theologian James Hal Cone.

Black Theology and Its Focus

James Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, taught that the struggle for Black liberation (freedom) was connected to the idea in the New Testament that God especially cares for the poor. This meant that God was "on the side of the oppressed."

Cone's work focused on the experiences of Black people who faced challenges like enslavement, Jim and Jane Crow laws (unfair laws that separated people by race), and ongoing racism. He believed that these experiences were very important for understanding theology.

The Rise of Womanist Thought

However, the ideas of James Cone and others often did not include the voices and experiences of Black women. This is where Womanist thought came in. It developed to add the missing perspectives of Black women to Black theology and ethics.

In the early 1980s, Katie Geneva Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, and Delores Williams were students at Union Theological Seminary. Their teachers included James H. Cone and Beverly Harrison. While Cone's Black theology didn't focus on women's voices, Harrison's work mainly looked at the experiences of white women. This meant that the unique experiences of Black women were often overlooked or grouped with either Black men or white women.

Cannon, Grant, and Williams wanted a way to talk about their own experiences as Black women. They found this way in Alice Walker's book, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Alice Walker defined "Womanist" in a special way that showed how the experiences of Black women were different from both white women and Black men. Using this idea, Womanist theology and ethics began through the work of Cannon, Williams, and Grant.

Stacey Floyd-Thomas's work continues this important Womanist scholarship in theology and ethics.

Key Publications

Stacey Floyd-Thomas has written and edited several important books.

Mining The Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics

One of her most important contributions to Womanist thought is her book, Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics. In this book, Floyd-Thomas explains how Womanist ethics works. She uses Alice Walker's definition of "Womanist" to show that it is a unique and important way of thinking about ethics within Christian studies.

She also describes four main ideas, or "tenets," of Womanist ethics:

• Radical Subjectivity: This means understanding and valuing each person's unique experiences and perspectives.
• Traditional Communalism: This refers to the importance of community and working together.
• Redemptive Self-Love: This is about loving and valuing oneself in a way that helps overcome challenges.
• Critical Engagement: This involves carefully examining and questioning ideas and situations.

These ideas help explain how Womanist ethics uses Walker's definition and different ways of studying ethics.

Other Important Books

Floyd-Thomas has also been the main author or editor for other books:

• Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society is a collection of essays from many leading Womanist scholars.
• Black Church Studies: An Introduction is a textbook that covers different topics related to the study of the Black church.
• In 2010, she co-edited "Liberation Theologies in the United States: An Introduction" with theologian Anthony B. Pinn.
• In 2011, she co-edited two books with Miguel A. De La Torre called Beyond the Pale. One book, subtitled Reading Ethics from the Margins, looks at twenty-four classic ethicists and philosophers from a Christian liberationist viewpoint. The other, Reading Theology from the Margins, examines thirty classic theologians.
• Her most recent book, co-authored with Juan M. Floyd-Thomas and Mark G. Toulouse, is called The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.

She also serves as a general editor for two book series: Religion and Social Transformation (with New York University Press) and 'Making It Plain': Approaches in Black Church Studies (with Abingdon Press).

Black Religious Scholars Group

The Black Religious Scholars Group (BRSG) is an organization that Stacey Floyd-Thomas helped create. She founded it with her husband, Juan Floyd-Thomas, and Duane Belgrave when they were graduate students.

Mission and Goals

The BRSG was started in 1996. Its main goal is to connect Black religious scholars with the larger Black community and its churches. They want to work together to achieve the goals of Black religion, which include liberation and helping people live full lives.

To do this, the BRSG aims to:

• Make the academic work of Black religious scholars more useful and available to the Black church and community.
• Create chances for Black scholars, churches, and community groups to work together. This includes addressing challenges facing Black communities.

Annual Consultations

Every year, the BRSG holds a meeting called a "consultation" at the same time as the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. These consultations help achieve their mission by encouraging discussions between Black scholars and local Black church communities. They also hold specific meetings at various Black churches across the country, from San Diego to Washington, D.C..

The BRSG Consultation is also a time to honor Black religious scholars who have made important contributions to the field of Black religion and who have stayed committed to Black religion in practice outside of universities.

Many respected scholars have been honored by the BRSG, including James H. Cone, Cornel West, Jacquelyn Grant, Katie G. Cannon, Delores S. Williams, and Michael Eric Dyson.

Stacey Floyd-Thomas continues to be the executive director of the BRSG. Other executive board members include Dr. Juan Floyd-Thomas, Rev. Dr. Duane Belgrave, Rev. Dr. Christine Wiley, and Rev. Dr. Dennis Wiley.