Abstract
Alice Walker does not claim to be a trained theological ethicist familiar with the details of womanist ethical methodologies used to help chart virtues and values helpful in living everyday life. However, it is precisely her attention to method that makes her work an excellent resource for womanist ethics. Remarkably similar to and perhaps being a source of inspiration to the womanist methodological approach of Katie G. Cannon, which was designed to lift virtues and values from themes in the lives and writings of women of African descent, Walker exhibits an approach in her writing that privileges the voices and stories of African American women. To honor Walker’s ethical voice and perspective as a resource for womanist religious thought, this chapter discusses in detail her methods.
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Notes
One example of this is the expository style and language that can be found in Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982).
Alice Walker, “Choosing to Stay at Home,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 158–170.
Alice Walker, dedication to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (New York: Feminist Press, 1979).
Alice Walker, “Father,” in Living by the Word: Selected Writings—1973–1987 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 9–17.
For more on “interdependent web of existence,” see the phrase as recorded in the Unitarian Universalist Church principles at www.uua.org. This allusion to the Web-like relationship between humanity and creation is also discussed by ecological ethicists. See, for example, Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998).
For more on virtue theory and the primary moral goal that is reflected in a set of canonical virtues when constructing a virtue ethic, see Peter J. Paris, Virtues and Values: The African and African American Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
It is important to note that the theme of survival is a central one of womanist thought, established primarily in the work of Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womansit God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). Theologian Dianne M. Stewart explains Williams’s emphasis on survival in “Womanist God-Talk on the Cutting Edge of Theology and Black Religious Studies: Assessing the Contribution of Delores Williams,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 58 (2004): 65–83. She writes that Williams’s theology of survival “permits an honest evaluation of their [black women’s] oppression as well as their strategies for living and affirming their worth and the worth of their communities in spite of racism, sexism, poverty, and violence” (86–87).
See Peter J. Paris Virtues and Values: The African and African American Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), as well as in this parental volume The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).
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© 2010 Melanie L. Harris
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Harris, M.L. (2010). Stay on the Path, Walk the Journey: Values to Hold On. In: Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113930_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113930_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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