Scholarship on African American history and culture has often neglected the tradition of African American women who engage in theological and religious reflection on their ethical and moral responsibility to care for the earth. Melanie Harris argues that African American women make distinctive contributions to the environmental justice movement in the ways that they theologize, theorize, practice spiritual activism, and come into religious understandings about our relationship with the earth. Incorporating elements of her family history to set the stage for her argument, Harris intersperses her academic reflections with her own personal stories and anecdotes.

This unique text stands at the intersection of several academic disciplines: womanist theology, eco-theology, spirituality, and theological aesthetics.
 

 
“Melanie Harris has written an engaging and provocative book that deserves to be widely read. She underscores the significance of African cosmology and African-American history to ecowomanist ways of being in the world. Her articulation of these broad cosmological and historical frameworks for effective environmental justice is brilliant and timely.” –Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, and co-author Journey of the Universe

Melanie L. Harris is Founding Director of African American and Africana Studies and Professor of Religion and Ethics at Texas Christian Univer­sity,. Dr. Harris also serves as an American Council of Education Fellow at the University of Denver. She is author of Gifts of Virtue, Alice Walker, and Womanist Ethics, and co-editor of Faith, Femi­nism and Scholarship (both Palgrave Macmillan). She holds a PhD from Union Theological Semi­nary, New York.