These three Black women, an activist, a theologian, and a psychologist, are envisioning a future where Black American Christians can lean into a more freeing, loving, and liberating faith.
First a podcast, and now a book, the woman collective is inviting Black women and others to what they call their “standing-room section,” as per The National Catholic Reporter.
After meeting at a conference, the Truth’s Table podcast co-hosts Christina Edmondson, Michelle Higgins, and Ekemini Uwan discovered together the value of laying out all the important topics necessary to identify with Black women in various church contexts.
From dating to the Black church, the Truth’s Table podcast has solidified its mark on the world among Black religion and spirituality podcasts. Now, the ambitious women are delivering spiritual enlightenment and personal breakthroughs in their book, Truth’s Table: Black Women’s Musings on Life, Love, and Liberation, which was released on April 26.
In their literary debut, Edmondson, Higgins, and Uwan offer a collection of stories and essays by Black women and for Black women, while casting a future for the Black church. The documentation aims to explore the spiritual dimensions of theology, politics, race, culture, and gender matters through a Christian lens.
“It’s hard for us to see ourselves, actually, culturally, unless we engage cross-culturally,” said Edmondson, a scholar-in-residence of a multiracial Presbyterian Church in America congregation in Nashville, Tennessee. “So I really think there is a benefit and a gift to people who don’t identify as Black Christian women to listen respectfully to these stories and narratives in the same way that I pick up books by authors who are outside of my own demographics all the time.”
The book is dedicated, in part, to “Black girls who considered leaving the church when their imago Dei (image of God) wasn’t enough.” This declaration is a love letter to Black women.
“It was important for us to be able to rightly identify the ways Black women have often felt like they just simply were not enough, or maybe too much, in various church contexts,” Edmondson said. “And so we wanted to be clear about that and name that, from the outset, to let Black women know we see you, we know you, and we love you.”
Uwan, the Black Christian Experience Resource Center’s 2022 inaugural Theologian-in-Residence, said she most looks forward to, “this Pan-African reunification of seeing and being reconnected with loved ones, distant relatives, ancestors that were snatched during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and seeing Africans and African Americans and Caribbean siblings being reunited and experiencing restoration together, the reclamation of their ethnic identity.”
The Truth’s Table book is available to purchase on Amazon.
The sixth season of the podcast is currently in session, along with the second podcast, “Get in the Word With Truth’s Table.”