My Sister, My Brother

Karen and Garth Baker-Fletcher used to teach at my seminary; both are now on faculty at Claremont School of Theology. Both are theologians who put their beliefs into strong practice, working out through their lives what it means to model and reflect their principles in their relationship with each other and with the world.This is modeled in the very structure of this text, My Sister, My Brother: while it follows the pattern of being a systematic theology in its broadest sense (looking at the different categories of traditional theology - God, Christ, Creation, Ecclesiology/Tradition, etc.), it does so from two perspectives that are related but distinct, with a conversation engaged at at each section's conclusion. This is in keeping with the sense of theological conversation methodology a la David Tracy and Gordon Kaufmann, adapted by Will Coleman to the term 'tribal talk'. This conversation has many aspects -- it is inductive, iconoclastic, concerned with social and historical position, and diunital (appreciating the differences, what biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann calls living in the tension between).The two perspectives here are Womanist and Xodus thought. Karen Baker-Fletcher takes the womanist perspective, drawing from the resources of her own background and the intellectual developments of womanism from Alice Walker, Delores Williams, and others. Womanism derives firstly from a reaction to Feminist theology, done primary by academic women of European background. Black women, while relating to many of the aspects of feminist theology and thought, saw that important elements of their own experience were not included. There is a unique perspective to women who were also black, having to endure the double-discrimination of gender and racial inequalities (Grant would later add a third category, the economic/poverty issue, that also plagues so many African-American women). Garth Baker-Fletcher writes from the Xodus perspective -- Xodus being a term of his creation, firmly planted in the second-generation of Black (male) theology, a liberation response to the continuing situation of African-Americans in the United States of inequality and racial injustice. Xodus derives in part from the same impulses that compelled Malcolm X to adopt the 'unknown' as his last name, recalling both that which was lost and that which can be reclaimed. Xodus also inspires thought about the biblical text Exodus, in which the people of Israel are led out of captivity into liberation. Xodus looks beyond simple liberation to issues of reconstruction and renewal, looking with alarm on the situation confronting 'ordinary' African-American persons in America today from economic and societal pressures. As do many theologians, Garth Baker-Fletcher adapts the language to suit his context -- using capitalisation, boldface, italics, and Ebonics-derived terminology (often in what might be traditionally considered ungrammatical or non-standard ways), he shakes up