Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care Tilling Sacred Grounds

Tilling Sacred Grounds centers Black women's interiority as a site for religious experience. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues that interiority is a site for the negotiation of gender, race, and sexuality and finds articulation in public religious practice. Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.