People

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

EMILIE TOWNES
PhD, Northwestern University
DMin, University of Chicago, The Divinity School
AM, University of Chicago, The Divinity School
BA, University of Chicago

Emilie Maureen Townes, an ordained American Baptist clergywoman, is a native of Durham, North Carolina. She holds a doctor of ministry degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a PhD in Religion in Society and Personality from Northwestern University. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale Divinity School.

She has served as Carolyn Williams Baird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and as professor of Christian social ethics and Black church ministries at Saint Paul School of Theology and instructor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University. Additionally, Townes served as an adjunct professor of ethics and society at Garrett-Evangelical and was a member of the field education staff. She has also been an adjunct professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she served as interim pastoral leader of Christ the Redeemer Metropolitan Community Church for three years. She is a past chair of the Board of Directors of reStart, Inc., an interfaith agency for the homeless in Kansas City, Missouri.

Dr. Townes served on the Commission on Life and Theology of the American Baptist Churches and on the National Commission on the Ministry. She is a former member of the General Board of the American Baptist Churches. Townes is a member of the Society of Christian Ethics, the Society for the Study of Black Religion, the American Academy of Religion, and the Ministers Council of the American Baptist Churches. She has served on the Women in Ministry Coordinating Committee of the National Council of Churches and the board of directors of the Ecumenical Women's Center. While a member of the Chicago Baptist Association, she served on its ordination commission and its long-range planning committee. She was the director of the Lilly Endowment teaching workshop, "Mining the Motherlode of African American Religious Life," sponsored by the American Academy of Religion and the Wabash Center Teaching and Learning Workshop for Pre-Tenure African American Faculty.

Dr. Townes's primary area of concern is African American women in the church. Her writing, teaching, and activism have centered on this and on drawing the linkages among race, gender, class, and other forms of oppression. Townes is co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. She is also the editor of two anthologies, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering and Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation. Her own books are Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope and In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness. Her most recent book is Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care. She is currently focusing on two areas of research. The first is the interrelationship between culture and evil. The second is women and health in the African diaspora with attention to Brazil and the United States.