Prathia Hall Lecture: Dr. Renita J. Weems

Princeton Theological Seminary welcomes Dr. Renita J. Weems to deliver the Prathia Hall Lecture on March 3 at 7:00 p.m. Weems' lecture is titled “Learning to Think Better Than We Have Been Trained: Black Women and the Academic Study of Religion.”

Those interested in attending this event may do so in person or watch via the livestream.

This lecture is presented by the Center for Theology, Women, and Gender.

In addition to being a former professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School (1987-2004), Dr. Renita Weems has taught at Spelman College, Howard University Divinity School, and Memphis Theological Seminary. She grew up in Atlanta, Georgia where she attended Atlanta public schools.

Weems earned a PhD degree at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1989, making her the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in Old Testament Studies. Her dissertation was a trailblazing effort. Writing in an era when women doctoral students hesitated to take on “women’s issue” topics, and when most male faculty still felt uncertain, if not uncomfortable, advising such topics, Weems chose to study marriage imagery in the Hebrew prophets. Her work offered careful, challenging, and often painful insights into use of this metaphor; moving beyond traditional scholarship, which had all too easily looked only at the “love” side of the marriage metaphor. Weems was among the first to point to the violence associated with this biblical imagery, violence acceptable within the prophets’ cultural assumptions about marriage and all too often considered acceptable even in 20th-century America. Weems’ 1995 volume Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets brought this important work to a wide audience, with powerful hermeneutical reflection on implications for contemporary understandings of God and of marriage. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible, published in 1989 along with a host of other articles and books highlighting the questions and experiences that Black women bring when reading the Bible, has sealed her legacy as a trailblazer in the field of womanist biblical scholarship. Her seminal essay “Reading Her Way: African American Women and the Bible” appeared in the landmark book Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (1991). Her commentary on the book of Song of Songs in the New Interpreter’s Bible (1997) remains an important resource for understanding biblical notions of love, sex, and human sexuality.

Finally, Weems is a biblical scholar, a minister, and an author whose scholarly insights into modern faith, biblical texts, and the role of spirituality in everyday lives has made her a highly sought-after writer and speaker for more than four decades. She has numerous books, commentaries, and articles on the Bible and prophetic religion to her credit. She has written multiple articles and essays for academics, preachers, and lay audiences on topics of faith, prophetic religion, Christian ethics, biblical notions of justice, women’s spirituality, and the Bible and human sexuality. She is the first Black woman to deliver the Yale University Lyman Beecher Lecture (2008). Weems is featured in “Black Stars: African American Religious Leaders” (2008), a collection of biographies of some of the most important Black Religious Leaders over the last 200 hundred years, including such impressive figures as Adam Clayton Powell, Elijah Muhammad, Sojourner Truth, Howard Thurman, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Weems lives in Nashville with her family.

Vaccination and wearing face coverings while indoors are expected for all campus visitors and guests. Face coverings are required indoors for all people, regardless of vaccination status. Please note speakers may remove their masks while presenting. Additionally, campus visitors should be prepared to share their names, phone numbers, and email addresses at the event, should contract tracing be necessary.

View the livestream of the 2022 Prathia Hall Lecture using the link below.

Established in 2019, the Prathia Hall lectureship is named in honor of Dr. Prathia Wynn Hall. Hall earned three degrees from Princeton Seminary: a Master of Divinity in 1982, a Master of Theology in 1984, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1997 in which she graduated magna cum laude. An activist in the Civil Rights Movement and a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Hall was a womanist theologian, a social ethics professor, and one of the first women ordained in the American Baptist Association.