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April 17, 2007
Yale professor challenges Hamline on Founders Day
During last week’s Founders Day keynote address, Yale professor and author Emilie Maureen Townes told Hamline students, faculty and community members that race, gender and class are not issues that are mutually exclusive. Dr. Townes explained that, as a womanist ethicist, she sees these issues as being inexorably tied and extremely important to social justice.
Townes, who is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale, covered a variety of topics, from the role of imagination in the formation of history, to stereotyping throughout America’s past, to Don Imus’ recent on-air racist and sexist comments.
Townes considers herself a womanist ethicist, which means she studies the way gender, race and class intersect social justice and ethics.
She highlighted the importance of personal and community responsibility in social justice for persons of faith as well as for the world at large. But standing in solidarity against injustice, she said, is not always easy. Townes admitted to being taken aback by the power that hateful and oppressive messages can still have, even to someone who studies such occurrences daily. When first-year Chris Matter asked for her response to Imus’ recent comments she said, “I thought I could never be surprised anymore. I now know I should never think that.”
Personal history also played an important role in Dr. Townes’ address, as she explained the importance of the “wise old folks” who helped raise her. She also challenged those in attendance to ask, “Where’s the church?” in a society that is increasingly militaristic.
Townes is a native of North Carolina and has taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, St. Paul Seminary in Kansas City, DePaul University in Illinois, and currently serves at Yale University.
Posted by dwright at April 17, 2007 12:15 AM
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