EDITORIAL COMMENT

Welcome to the journal of Black Women and Religious Cultures!

The release of this biannual, peer-reviewed journal at the moment of a mixed-race African and South Asian woman being elected vice president of the United States of America signals our intention to centralize intellectual discourses about the diverse, intersectional religious and spiritual realities, individualities, and practices of Black women from any geographic area of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Recognizing the consequential roles Black women, worldwide, play as keepers, catalysts, and leaders of cultures, communities, and societies, as well as the complex, significant meanings of religion and spirituality for Black women across generations, this journal emerges as a forum for analyzing religion and spirituality in social issues, cultural practices and constructions, politics, law, activism, the arts, education, ritual, gender and gender identities, the environment, and more.

Such broad reading of religious and spiritual sites presents an opportunity to use a wide range of singular and mixed methodologies to provide rigorous analyses, rich theoretical construction, and convincing creative interpretations through essays and creative expressions that expand intellectual, canonical, and epistemological narratives by and about Black women and religious cultures in every historical era.

This inaugural issue shares essays from Brazil, the United States, and Nigeria that use diverse methods, including psychology, cultural studies, film study, legal theory, intersectionality theory, and literary analysis, to discuss a model of care to advance Black women’s wellbeing, Black women’s eyes and hands as sources of Justice, religion and representations of Black women in film, and the Grand Mother Spirit in healing from anti-Black violence.

We celebrate the editorial board’s affirmation and insights shared from Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States. Development of the journal was bolstered tremendously by the Manifold Project of the University of Minnesota Press. We appreciate the opportunity to collaborate, and we are grateful for Manifold and the University of Minnesota Press’s encouragement and support of our launch.

_______________________________________________________________ Rosetta E. Ross

Black Women and Religious Cultures Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2020 | ©2020 Black Women and Religious Cultures, Manifold-University of Minnesota Press. | All rights reserved.