JFSR VOL. 20, NO. 1
INTRODUCTION TO THE ISSUE

This issue of JFSR is a very special one. It not only begins the 20^th volume of JFSR's publication, but it is also intended as a gift for the 70^th birthday of Mercy Amba Oduyoye, the foremost African feminist theologian and outstanding leader in the ecumenical movement. I believe it is important to celebrate birthdays of leading feminists not just as personal high points but as milestones of the feminist movement in religion, of which they are a part. This enables all of us, but especially future generations of feminists, to learn from their thought and struggle. I hope Mercy will accept this small token of our gratitude and respect for her transnational work.

JFSR is greatly indebted to editorial board member Katie Geneva Cannon for initiating this project and to co-editor Kwok Pui-lan for bringing it to a successful conclusion. A heartfelt thanks to both of them as well as to managing editors Deborah Whitehead and Sarah Sentilles for their "labor of love." I join them in congratulating Mercy on her 70^th birthday and hope that this issue of JFSR focusing on feminist cultural hermeneutics will contribute to the variegated intellectual discussions that she has cultivated.

Kwok Pui-lan opens the issue with an introductory essay on Oduyoye's theoretical and organizational work. She situates Oduyoye's cultural hermeneutics with reference to the two major directions in African theology--inculturation and liberation. Kwok argues that Oduyoye's work challenges and corrects both, for whereas the inculturation approach does not sufficiently take into account the economic and structural implications of patriarchal culture, the liberationist approach does not sufficiently take into account gender and culture. While Oduyoye's theology has been influenced by the postcolonial condition, Kwok argues that Oduyoye's attention to the hybridization of Christianity and her emphasis on diversity in postcolonial fashion reject "the colonial idea that cultures are fixed and tightly bound." Hence African wo/men's cultural hermeneutics has to be multidimensional. In addition, Kwok highlights the importance of Oduyoye's methodological attention to "folktalk," which Oduyoye does not idealize but rather scrutinizes for its rhetorical power to inculcate feminine identity and submission.

Kwok concludes her analysis of Oduyoye's work by pointing to her significant contributions to the institutionalization of African wo/men's theological work and to the development of a global feminist theology of hospitality. She underscores Oduyoye's astute interpretation of African wo/men's situation, her fostering of collaboration among Two-Thirds World feminists, and her challenge to Western feminists to relate to African wo/men with respect, reciprocity, and genuine solidarity.

Letty Russell's contribution seeks to draw out the implications of Oduyoye's work for articulating a feminist Christian theology of mission. Following Oduyoye's lead in "using gendered cultural hermeneutics to unpack mission and other theological topics from a feminist perspective," Russell proposes the metaphor of G*d's "trinitarian mission as an expression of love and welcome for all people" for a feminist reformulation of mission.

Feminists as postcolonial subjects, Russell argues, participate through the practice of "emancipatory difference" in the sending and mending activity of G*d, who "created a world of riotous difference in which creation and creature alike show forth a rainbow variety of God's goodness." Such a feminist reconceptualization of mission as the practice of emancipatory difference must accomplish three things: first, resist essentializing difference; second, build relational difference; and third, form coalitions across difference. Oduyoye's "African dream" invites us to form coalitions across difference and to make that dream a reality by making each other strong. While Russell is aware of the negative implications and results of Christian mission, she nevertheless seeks to reformulate rather than abandon a theology of mission.

The next two articles shift the discussion from a focus on gendered cultural hermeneutics in Christian feminist theology to the study of gender in African religions and a comparative theological investigation of African-based religious discourse.

Oyeronke Olajubu utilizes her research among the Yoruba people to discuss gender relations in four areas of Yoruba religion: cosmology, sacred knowledge, divination, and the goddess tradition. In contrast to Oyeronke Oyewumi, who maintains that Yoruba language and culture are not dichotomized by gender and that gender is an import of Western colonialism into Yoruba society, Olajubu argues on the basis of Yoruba mythology and religion that gender is an important category in Yoruba society, although it is quite different from the Western cultural conceptualization of gender.

Olajubu recognizes the difficulty of analyzing gender inscriptions in non-gender based languages using Western androcentric language categories, and therefore she stresses that gender categories in Yoruba culture are very fluid and flexible. Whereas certain male and female features are assumed as definite Yoruba gender constructs, there is also a clear fluidity of Yoruba gender understandings in spirit possession and cross-gender dressing. Olajubu concludes that it is necessary to acknowledge and utilize wo/men's religious experience for any meaningful evaluation of the normative claims of religious traditions in general and the Yoruba religious world in particular. Her essay makes a very important theoretical contribution to the feminist cultural hermeneutics pioneered by Oduyoye.

Dianne Stewart in turn combines her study of the African religious heritage of the Caribbean with a womanist theological method. She focuses on Kumina culture and religion, which was established in Jamaica in the 19^th century and has experienced an official cultural revival in the 20^th century. Her article seeks to contribute to a global womanist formation by analyzing the religious experience of African Caribbean wo/men in a non-Christian religion and using a womanist theological method to scrutinize the relationship between gender and power in an African-based religion.

Stewart argues that a comparative theological approach would allow womanist theologians to abandon a kind of Christian apologetics that has prevented the critical examination and utilization of African religious traditions as resources for theological reflection. She identifies four "avenues of empowerment for women within African-based Caribbean religions like Kumina": the nurturing of Black female agency; the empowerment of Black wo/men as official leaders, healers, and teachers; female personification and embodiment of the Divine; and Divine revelation through incarnation in female bodies through trance.

However, Stewart does not idealize this African-based religion, but is critically aware that in Jamaica female Kumina practitioners are often impoverished financially, educationally, vocationally, and otherwise. Her study of African Caribbean wo/men's religious experience and theological framework is thus a very significant contribution to Oduyoye's African dream of justice, liberation, and well being for all.

C. S'thembile West's poems are a special birthday gift. They articulate the dream African wo/men dream in a different language and tonality, celebrating African American wo/men's everyday experience in rich language and luscious imagery that make present the goodness of Divine creation and point to the fullness of life in hope:

In the pregnant silence of 4am
Spirits gather to replenish maat
Dawn hovers over sacred moments
To infuse new life and hope
Into yesterday's horizon
Melting slowly into tomorrow
Covered with dreams…

The clashing voices of the Roundtable discussion remind us that the "dream of a common language" (Adrienne Rich) and solidarity across differences are far from being realized and require continuing struggle against unrecognized bias and internalized essentializing difference. JFSR is grateful to Amy-Jill Levine for having initiated this discourse and debate on anti-Judaism in global feminist theologies and to Kwok Pui-lan for suggesting this roundtable format. I also want to thank Musimbi Kanyoro, Adele Reinhartz, Hisako Kinukawa, and Elaine Wainwright for accepting our invitation to engage in this difficult debate.

Although the charge of anti-Judaism in Christian feminist theology has been discussed extensively by North American and European feminist theologians, such a dialogue between feminists from different socio-cultural and geographical locations is very new. The discussion featured in this issue documents how difficult such an interdisciplinary and interreligious global exchange among feminists from different social locations still remains. Not only questions of religion and theology, but also differences in theoretical and theological perspective and especially in the experience of power, politics, colonialism, class, culture, national identity, and hegemonic discourse make understanding each other difficult. Although Levine contemplates that such a dream of mutual understanding is perhaps eschatological, I hope that readers from around the world will continue this important conversation.

In the Living It Out section, Margaret Farley shows that collaboration across differences is not only possible but also necessary. Her essay "Partnership in Hope: Gender, Faith, and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa," details her own journey "into the heart of the HIV/AIDS pandemic," and also relates how the Women's Initiative at Yale University Divinity School has formed partnerships among students, faculty, and administrators at YDS, with Yale University at large, with a U.S. government agency (USAID), and especially with members and leaders of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, of which Oduyoye is a founding member.

These variegated partnerships were formed in order to address how the pandemic affects African wo/men's lives and to investigate how religious traditions and communities have been "both a part of the problem regarding the spread of the HIV infection and a part of the remedy." The work to be undertaken therefore has to be cross-cultural and interfaith. Farley is keenly aware of the difficulties and pitfalls such partnerships across cultural and religious differences have to overcome, but she also shows how a focus on a common problem such as HIV/AIDS can enable constructive collaborations that engender a different feminist theological and ethical discourse.

Finally, I want to bring to the attention of our readers and subscribers that beginning with this issue the JFSR has a new publishing home in Indiana University Press. Please note the new address for subscriptions and renewals on the subscription information page. We want to thank Executive Director Professor Kent Richards and Managing Editor Ms. Leigh Andersen of the Society of Biblical Literature for all the work they have done for JFSR. We are very grateful that they have expertly published and skillfully managed and promoted the journal for the past four years. We have teamed up with a new publisher in the hope that JFSR will find a wider audience, especially in the feminist studies community, and that it will flourish under the professional leadership of Dr. Kathryn Caras, Director of Electronic and Serials Publishing of Indiana University Press. Finally, we want to thank all of our readers for their interest in and support of JFSR, and we hope to be able to continue to count on it in the coming years.