Description: Reading Howard Thurman introduces Howard Thurman and the art of interpretation through the experience of a Black woman. Smith leverages womanist biblical sensibilities and commitments to open up the world of Thurman. She pays attention to the images that occupied Thurman as he made sense of life and notes their womanist forms as relevant for today.
Brief description:
Shively T. J. Smith is associate professor of New Testament at Boston University and a leading Howard Thurman scholar of her generation. She is the author of two books, Strangers to Family: Diaspora and 1 Peter's Invention of God's Household and Interpreting 2 Peter through African American Women's Moral Writings, and is the editor for The SBL Study Bible.
Review Quotes:
With great erudition, beautiful prose, and womanist genius, Smith has produced the most sophisticated account of Howard Thurman's interpretive practice to date. This book is a gem that will serve generations of readers of both scripture and Howard Thurman. This book is a pedagogical feast. It will become a standard text in every introduction to the Bible course. --Willie James Jennings, Yale Divinity School
What happens when Howard Thurman's biblical imagination is read through the moral clarity, spiritual wisdom, and embodied experience of Black women? Thanks to the close reading Shively T. J. Smith offers us in Reading Howard Thurman, we don't have to wonder. Moving beyond abstraction, Smith places Thurman's meditations on Jesus, the inner life, and spirit work in conversation with the everyday theologies of Black women--those who have long read scripture as a survival practice and a call to collective flourishing. In doing so, the book both honors Thurman's imagination and gently presses it further, revealing how womanist spirituality reroutes our understanding of biblical faith away from lack and toward the inherited wisdom of Black women. --Dana A. Williams, dean, Howard University Graduate School
Biblical scholar Shively Smith lovingly, prayerfully, vulnerably, and poetically weaves a tapestry of meaningful interpretation of Howard Thurman's interpretation of life, including the Bible. This encounter with Thurman's ways of reading through womanist eyes ignites fresh sight and plants green pastures in the holy fog of interpretation. Out of raw existential grief emerges this literary liturgy that creates a sacrament of pause for every reader. This work ties scholarship and spirit together, creating a prayer book of meaning so much so that it not only provides information but ushers the reader into transformation through a meeting with the divine Presence. As such, readers will walk away intuiting that they have encountered God because this work leaves a sense that through their reading, they have actually been read. Smith reveals that writing and reading can also be holy ground. --Luke A. Powery, dean, Duke University Chapel and Professor of Homiletics and African and African American Studies, Duke Divinity School