Dr. Shannen Dee Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton. She is an award-winning scholar of the African American experience and Black Catholicism with research and teaching specializations in women's, religious, and Black freedom movement history. Dr. Williams holds a B.A. in history with magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from Agnes Scott College, a M.A. in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. The first Black woman elected to the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association, Dr. Williams is a co-founder the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 2020, Williams also submitted successful proposals to establish the Mother Mary Lange Lecture in Black Catholic History at Villanova University and the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. Prize through the American Catholic Historical Association and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. A lifelong Catholic, Dr. Williams authored the award-winning column, The Griot's Cross, for the Catholic New Service from 2020 to 2022.
For most people, Whoopi Goldberg's performance as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act is the dominant interpretation of an African American nun and the desegregation of white Catholic sisterhood in the United States. In this presentation, Dr. Shannen Dee Williams will explore the story of America's real sister act: the story of how generations of Black women and girls called to the sacred vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience fought against racism, sexism, and exclusion to become and minster as consecrated women of God in the Roman Catholic Church. In so doing, she will turn attention to women's religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation, and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle. Dr. Williams will also illuminate Thomas Merton's connections to Black sisters' largely suppressed history.
Robert Ellsberg - 'It's the Direction that Matters': How Sister Wendy Beckett Changed Her Mind about Merton
Sophfronia Scott - Courageous Conversations on Death with Thomas Merton
Leslye Colvin - Merton: An Invitation to Unbind Him and Ourselves
Anne Pearson - White Man Writing on Racism: Thomas Merton and ”Letters to a White Liberal”
Ilia Delio - Merton’s Christophany and the Second Axial Monk
Cassidy Hall - Queering Thomas Merton
BONUS episode, Simone Campbell - Hunger for Hope: Contemplation and Political Action
BONUS episode, Sophia Park - Dancing with Thomas Merton in the Borderland
BONUS episode, Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer - Women in Merton’s Life: Notes on His Experience with the Feminine
Mark C. Meade - The Seven Storey Mountain at Seventy-Five: Classic or Déclassé?
BONUS episode: Christopher Pramuk’s Presidential Address for Sophia Comes Forth Reaching, the 18th General Meeting of the ITMS
Jim Robinson - Spirituality Sustainability and Social Justice: Embodying “Integral Ecology” with Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Ruether
Patrick F. O’Connell - Beyond the Blurbs: Thomas Merton and St. Augustine
Mary Frohlich, RSCJ - Merton as Disciple and Re-interpreter of St. John of the Cross
Bob Grip - Washington Watches the Monk II
Emma McDonald - Fully Human and Fully Real: Thomas Merton on Technology and Embodiment
David Golemboski - People that God Has Brought together: Thomas Merton on the Hope of Political Community Beyond Nationalism
2022-11-08 - Partners in the General Dance of the Spirit: Thomas Merton and Ilia Delio Evolving into the Grandeur of God
2022-10-11 - Julianne Wallace - Of Messengers of Peace: A Liturgy for Our World in the Voices of Merton and Francis
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