Follow-up to WATERtalk Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, 2^nd Edition

With Dr. M. Shawn Copeland

WATER thanks Shawn Copeland for sharing her book Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, 2^nd Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023). It is a very important volume on Black women’s shaping influence on contemporary Catholic theological understandings of human experience. 

The program began with a land acknowledgement as well as an acknowledgement of current authoritarian actions of the U.S. federal government, especially the killings in Minneapolis. WATER is committed to preserving open spaces for this kind of educational work. 

The video and these notes can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJhlFNYPn1I 

Please feel free to share this material with others. 

Mary E. Hunt’s Introduction to Shawn Copeland

It is with delight that I welcome to WATER Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, Professor Emerita of Systematic Theology from the Department of Theology and the Program in African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) at Boston College. We have known one another over the long years in Catholic theological and especially in feminist/womanist circles in religion. It is an honor to have you on this WATERtalk, Shawn, to talk about your important book, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being.  

Dr. Copeland received the PhD in Systematic Theology from Boston College where she wrote a dissertation focused on the Canadian Jesuit theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s idea of the human good. 

She taught theology for 35 years including stints at St. Norbert College, Yale University Divinity School, and Marquette University. For the 17 years before her retirement, she taught at Boston College. 

Her contributions to theological anthropology and political theology, as well as to African and African American intellectual history and religious experience, have been deeply appreciated by her Boston College colleagues. As one of her 

colleagues, Assistant Professor of Theology and African and African Diaspora Studies Program Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones put it, “Copeland’s voice is one that is indefatigable, fighting to show those who say they love God, how they have failed to love their neighbor… Theologizing from the treatment of black women’s bodies historically through chattel slavery to the present, Shawn raised the alarm

–for the church at large, and for the Catholic Church in particular–that failing to address theologically the questions of race and gender and poverty and oppression, was a failure to serve God rightly.” I concur. 

Dr. Copeland has written more than 125 articles and chapters. Her books include: Knowing Christ Crucified: The Witness of African American Religious Experience (2018) and The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille (2009).

Shawn is the consummate teacher. The Catholic Theological Society of America gave her their highest honor, the John Courtney Murray Award. The Black Religious Scholars of the American Academy of Religion gave her their Distinguished Scholar Award. The Black Religious Scholars Group named her a “Womanist Legend.”  

We are in the presence of a great theologian. Today, we have the privilege of a discussion with her of her signal volume, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being, now in a second edition (2023). 

We at WATER publish lists with short commentaries on our website of “What We’re Reading.” Of the first edition of Enfleshing Freedom we wrote, “M. Shawn Copeland ties the suffering that African American women have endured with the suffering Christ experienced through historical research as well as references to postmodern racism, discrimination, sexism, bodily abuse, and the lasting effects of colonialism. Copeland writes, ‘If the cries of the victims are the voice of God, then the faces of the victims are the face of God, the bodies of the victims are the body of God.’ (p 101) Readers will find the book illuminating as a womanist theological way to enflesh freedom.”

Of the second edition, WATER wrote, “This signal volume has been updated from the 2009 version to a new, significantly changed edition that is well worth reading. The updates are generally painful, especially the lynching of Black women, but that history needs reporting. The result is a fresh book that invites serious and sustained study as a resource for justice-making.”

I note that not many books go into a second edition these days. But from 2009, when the first edition appeared, to 2023, and now 2026, the importance of and urgency about this book have only increased. 

I turn the word now over to Dr. Shawn Copeland with respect, with thanks, and with delight. 

Shawn Copeland’s Remarks

Shawn generously shared these notes on which her talk was based. Please watch/listen to the video for the full lecture in all of its engaging complexity. 

WaterTalk 2026

Dr. M. Shawn Copeland

Professor emerita, Systematic Theology, the Department of Theology

and the Program in African and African Diaspora Studies

Boston College

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the 

courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.

Our demand is simple: stop killing us.

Johnetta Elzie

Thank you Dr. Hunt for inviting me to speak about this second edition of Enfleshing Freedom and my thanks to all of you who are joining in this discussion. I look forward to your comments and questions. 

Enfleshing Freedom is an exercise in theology as political that aims to meet the exigences or demands of systematic theology in wrestling with concrete historical, cultural, religious, social, and existential circumstances riddled with sin and irrationality. This second edition takes into account the impact of devastating global imperialism with its cruel (re)production of abused, impoverished, depleted children, women, and men around the world who have been made migrants; of the unspeakable, reprehensible “neo-lynchings” of Black (and brown) children, youth, women, and men; and of the ongoing vicious depredation of “the least of the least” (Matt 25:45), Black female human persons.

In the time allotted, I want to provide a backdrop for our discussion. First, I clarify the theological genre within which Enfleshing Freedom was conceived and written; then, advert to the basic question with which it wrestles; third, consider the doctrine on which it focuses; and, finally, because the course directly poses the question of salvation, say something about the meaning of the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Theological Genre:  We all know that theology is an academic discipline, yet it makes a claim that no other academic discipline can dare to entertain. Because of its intimate, if edgy, relationship to Christian tradition, belief, and practice, theology seeks to understand, to interpret, and to impart the word of God and its meanings in various historical, cultural, and social (i.e., political, economic, and technological) contexts. 

When theology intentionally commits its intellectual praxis to the service of the poor and marginalized; when it interrogates history, culture, and society in remembrance of the crucified Christ; when it critiques the moral and ethical values of the society within which it functions; when it unmasks all theories and theologies that covertly or overtly prop up whatever ideologies threaten to destroy God’s creation; and when it contests any reduction of reality, of truth, and of meaning, then that theology is resolutely political. Enfleshing Freedom is a political theology in the U. S. context, that holds itself accountable to the dangerous memory of chattel slavery, with its erotic violence and soul murder, even as the bodies of the indigenous peoples pile up before our door. Our historical and cultural amnesia are deep and protracted; they have produced that thick-crusted layer of moral, cultural, and social racism that James Cone has named America’s ‘original sin.’ 

Enfleshing Freedom is an example of womanist theology:  drawing on Katie Cannon’s definition it disentangles or differentiates Black women’s bodily and social experience from that of Black men and non-Black women and men, uncovers sexism and homophobia in the Black community, and illustrates the cultural production of evil. At the same time, the theology worked out in Enfleshing Freedom resonates with contemporary theological treatments of trauma. Shelley Rambo’s work is important in this regard. Indeed, the Middle Passage with its brutalities of de-creation traumatize —marking the psyches of its victims with a sense of profound and lingering displacement, irrevocable and irretrievable loss. 

Enfleshing Freedom contributes to body theology. Since the involuntary arrival of Black women in the West, the black female body has been relegated to the margin, pressed to and beyond ordinary limits. Black women were culturally and socially constructed by the dominate culture as a marginated being —living, breathing, bleeding, struggling, thinking, hoping, and loving on the margin. The black female body was used as the ‘exotic’ outer edge against which men, white and Black, tested physical and sexual prowess. Her biological fertility was manipulated to increase the planter’s margin of profit. Pressed to the margin, enfleshing outsider status in religion, culture, and society, Black women became liminal. Finally, given its demand for reverence toward God’s human creatures, Enfleshing Freedom, I should hope, is recognizable as Catholic and catholic theology. DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, is a way to talk about God using the Latin name. 

Fundamental Question:  Enfleshing Freedom engages theological anthropology in the concrete; it relates the experience of social suffering. The term social suffering refers to way in which oppression may be understood as human problem of social injustice. To put it differently, the oppression that is made to afflict human persons occurs within particular social arrangements shaped in the progress or decline of historical, religious, cultural, and social patterns and institutions. Yet, even massive, “maldistributed, negative, enormous, and transgenerational” social suffering cannot abrogate human free will—hence, the defiant enfleshing of freedom. For, freedom forms an essential constituent of being human even as the effective exercise of that freedom may be formed or deformed by finitude, by the limitations of time and place and circumstance, that is, by history. Social suffering is a way to refer to oppression that creates injustice. The writing of Nancy Pineda-Madrid comes to mind on feminicide in Ciudad Juarez. 

Enfleshing Freedom holds memory in utmost seriousness. Columbia University’s Saidiya Hartman quite rightly observes that memory never simply can be an inventory of what went before. In the name of the memory of the passion and death of Jesus of Nazareth, Johann Baptist Metz proposed the notion of ‘dangerous memory’ as a fundamental political theological category—memory that protests forgetfulness of those body persons rendered ‘other.’ In Enfleshing Freedom slave narratives function as sites of dangerous memory—memory that makes demands upon our minds and hearts and living, memory that simply cannot be washed away, memory that must be confronted.

Theological Anthropology: In working out a theological anthropology, Enfleshing Freedom privileges suffering Black bodies, since focus on these bodies uncovers and remembers the suffering body at the heart of Christian belief. The book holds the historicity and signifying presence of the Incarnate Word among us with utmost seriousness. Rather than serve any “Christological imperialism,” the conjunction of the broken body of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth and the broken bodies of Black women re-narrates the relation between Christology and anthropology. Enfleshing Freedom strives to show how Jesus’ life and ministry contested all forms of hierarchy, privilege, and repression, and repudiated all dogmas and institutions that enslave, divide human beings one from another, abuse the poor, and confine the rich to gilded cages. This portrait relies on critical reading of the historical and social context of Jesus’ lifeworld. And, from the perspective of political theology, Jesus’ life and ministry, death and resurrection reverse empire and its callous treatment and disposal of marginalized bodies.

This thematization of theological anthropology holds (1) that the body may be a site and mediation of divine revelation; (2) that the body shapes human existence as relational and social; (3) that the creativity of the Triune God may be manifest in differences of gender, race, and sexuality; (4) that solidarity is a set of body practices; and (5) that the Eucharist orders and transforms our bodies as the body of Christ. Privileging the Black woman’s body makes these claims specific and particular. Rather than exclude or replace or diminish other body persons, specificity and particularity insist that we all are subjects. Since the fifteenth century’s radical and expedient subjugation of a people to demonized difference, all human bodies have been caught up in an immense web of violence that operated through body valuation, body commerce, and body exchange to serve the accumulation of wealth. Taking the black woman’s body as a starting point for theological anthropology allows us to interrogate the results of that demonization in and consequences for religion, history, culture, and society.

Changes: Writers go on to learn. This second edition is a rethinking of the earlier text. This new edition expands the discussion in chapter 1 of the abuse of South African Khoisan woman Sarah Baartman, not only to unmask more critically the European (British, French, and Dutch) colonial contexts in which white and Black or Coloured male persons manipulated her body and assaulted her dignity, but to learn from the new scholarship of Black South African and diasporic women. 

Chapter 4 grew out of the necessity to consider the withering spread of what term the new sovereign (dis)order or the new empire as globalization. The Epstein scandal shows we can traffic anything and everyone.

The new chapter 6 discusses two contemporary movements, #SayHerName and #BlackLivesMatter, that continue freedom’s struggle to protect and honor the bodies, lives, and dignity of Black human persons; at the same time, this chapter takes seriously Black women’s resistance to sexual assault during the slave trade and their marginalization in Black movements for freedom, civil rights, and social justice. For example, Mahalia Jackson was the one who encouraged Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to dream, something that was not known previously. Black women’s names in the history of civil rights need to be lifted up. 

In chapter 7, I expand the treatment of the cross and the lynching tree, borrow Angela Sims’s nomenclature of neo-lynching, and bring to the fore the lynchings of Black women.

In the cultural matrix that is the United States, everything has changed since 1619, and nothing has changed. Johnetta Elzie’s stark declaration simultaneously marks both the forced arrival of Blackhuman persons in the English-speaking sector of the “new world” and our continuing experience: “stop killing us.” Yet Elzie’s cry may well express the pain of all impoverished, all minoritized peoples of color, all religiously, culturally, gender, and sexually minoritized peoples in the US matrix. And, amid this maldistributed, vicious, transgenerational social suffering, Christianity too often dissembles; if it arrives at all, it does so much too late and with little effect. 

History is key. In the U.S., indigenous people are still here; descendants of enslaved people are here. Puerto Rico is part of the United States. Women who were trafficked are still here. It is all still fresh which makes living well together hard. 

Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. Ours is a time of continuing struggle: the critique of experience and understanding, the dynamism of thought and challenge, the necessity of accountability, the responsibility of judgment and action; the move toward personal integrity or authenticity, not for self alone, but for community; resistance to presuppositions, stereotypes, prejudgments, stultifying pasts, violence, death-dealing; self-transcendence; the daily making and constituting of ourselves as ikons of the Holy, emanating centers of solidarity, of true and authentic value and love––human persons seeking to enflesh freedom.

Can any solace be found in the horrible torture and deaths of the enslaved people? Can any higher ground or higher perspective be located? As a Christian theologian, as a believer, I find no solace in anyone undergoing oppression and torture to death. I find no consolation or comfort in the dis-graceful situation that was chattel slavery or in the social suffering caused by white racist supremacy that leaches into religion, culture, and society today. 

Yet, as a Christian theologian, I pursue my craft in faith, in a knowledge born of love; I believe that evil shall never have the final word. I hang on to hope with my fingernails. Thus, I discern a higher ground, a higher perspective—Golgotha, the place of our redemption. The absolute, transcendent solution to the cultural production of evil can be found only in the darkly luminous mystery of the life-death-resurrection of the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth. This solution is anticipated in the concrete graced praxis of Christian community; yet it is and shall remain—even until the last day—the gracious, mysterious, eschatological gift of a merciful, provident, and just God. We have to get ready for the coming of the reign of God, or as Ada Maria Isasi Diaz said, the kin-dom of God. 

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WATER expressed deep appreciation for Shawn’s remarks. 

Discussion followed. Again, we advise watching the whole exchange on the video to get the full, rich conversation. Following are a sample of the issues raised and questions asked by participants, as well as responses given by Sean Copeland (SC).

1. A colleague who represents an NGO at the United Nations suggested the need to use different vocabulary now as the same old language does not work. For example, women of color taking their kids out of Latin America for their safety are non-violent resisters not simply immigrants. 

SC responded that thinking about migration as non-violent resistance is a new and useful way to conceive of it. She referenced the efforts by ICE to repurpose buildings as detention facilities. The backlash against those effort have resulted in some owners taking their properties off the market.  

It is time to act as a neighbor to people. Like the Buddhist monks who walked from Texas to Washington, DC, Christians need to be on the move. Repression is all over the country. Immigrants do jobs that others don’t want to do. They do hard work and work hard.

2. Another colleague who worked as a mediator and counselor underscored the need for good historical information and critical thinking. 

SC said that changes in educational practices need to be scrutinized. Learning to be adult about facts of history is a challenge. Limiting and containing people on lands, e.g., reservations and internment camps, is being repeated now. We are not responsible for what happened in 1695, but we are responsible for how people are treated today. We can change. 

3. A colleague in Australia who was attending a conference on gender violence was taken by the idea that “Everything has changed and nothing has changed” especially in relation to land. 

SC reflected on settler colonialism and the origins of places like the U.S. State of Georgia and Australia as penal colonies. She underscored the importance of efforts in Australia to build new relations with indigenous people, to raise consciousness by the use of Land Acknowledgements.

4. The moderator appreciated Shawn’s citing Angela Sims on “neo-lynching” in SC’s newly revised Chapter 7. This chapter is one of the hardest theological texts to read—the pain leaps off the page. The fear of random death that is instilled in Black people by lynching is palpable and needs to be named: George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, et al. The recent arrest of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort who were reporting in a church during a demonstration is a good example. After a federal judge said there was no probable cause of crime on their part, the DOJ kicked the matter up to a grand jury.  Mr. Lemon was taken into custody at 11 PM so that he would have to spend the night in jail before a court appearance. Talk about neo-lynching! We need to put that term into the vocabulary.  

SC observed that detention is kidnapping. Bounty hunting is a still a real thing. All of this instills terror into people, including white people. Nonetheless, some people are clinging to old values, such as being good neighbors as is on display in Minneapolis. 

She went on to discuss the power of misogyny. For example, a white woman, Rene Nicole Good, and a white man, Alex Pretti, were killed by ICE in  Minneapolis. The woman, a lesbian, rather receded from the news while the man, a nurse, became the central focus. 

5. The moderator continued to discuss lynching. In a recent WATERtalk with Melanie Morrison (https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/watertalks/ January, 2026) about her book Becoming Trustworthy White Allies (Duke University Press, 2025), Melanie discussed lynching as having the strong component of spectatorship. White people took their children to view the spectacle. She mentioned the publicity of lynchings down to the postcards and newspaper articles. SC makes reference to this as well. Melanie makes the point that for white children, seeing a lynching is a way to erode their sense of what is real and good. What child can ever trust their parents’ ethics if they took their children to this blood sport? What child can ever find their own moral compass when this evil beyond imagining is presented as good, their own nascent sense of life is negated? 

SC lifted up James Allen’s book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which traces the history of lynching.

On the question of children trusting their parents, SC observed astutely that there were also white children who simply followed their parents’ lead. Lynching was a ‘normal’ thing.

She also pointed out that the Civil Rights movement was a non-violent movement. Today’s struggles are generally not violent except insofar as deeply rooted violence is normalized, for example, the abuse of women. There is still a perception that Black people do not perceive pain. Medical students have to learn in their training that Black people do indeed feel pain. This is remarkable. 

6. A person who admires SC’s work raised the question of eucharistic solidarity. 

SC pointed to prayer and Eucharist as sources of change and expressions of solidarity. She alluded to the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory, an insect flapping its wings on one location and making change (in the weather, for example) in another part of the world. Perhaps prayer is like that. 

She also talked about enslaved people who lived well morally in the midst of their enslavement. Some never imagined another way to live than as a slave, but they managed to treat one another well nonetheless. 

The moderator raised the doubled edged sword that the Eucharist is in the institutional Roman Catholic Church given that women are excluded from eucharistic leadership.  

SC referred to a recent Commonweal article (by Paul Baumann) quoting Mary Douglas who had suggested getting women involved in a high-level Vatican Commission on Women to deal with women’s issues and not worry about eucharistic leadership, that is, priesthood. These articles need to be studied. 

SC thinks of priesthood as a call and does not think that the Holy Spirit discriminates on the basis of race, class, or gender. If it does, her advice to her students is get another God! 

 Examining today’s world in light of religious teachings is theological work. The point of the New Testament is to shake people up. SC recommended Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949) for a view of Jesus answering the question “who is my neighbor?” 

Christian Nationalism is a major current problem. We can change. To do so, SC said using  a quote from Sven Lindquvist with which she began her lecture: “It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” 

WATER appreciated the participation of everyone in a lively and productive discussion, especially the wisdom and generosity of Shawn Copeland. 

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Additional Resources mentioned by Shawn Copeland:

1. “The Seven Genders in the Talmud” by Rachel Scheinerman. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-eight-genders-in-the-talmud/

2. “The Priesthood’s Ritual Logic: Why the debate over women’s ordination is about more than equality” by Paul Baumann, Commonweal, February 10, 2026, 

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/baumann-women-priests-ordination-gender-church#:~:text=Many%20Catholic%20women%20continue%20to,indispensable%20to%20the%20Church’s%20identity. He refers to theologian Mary Douglas’ article, “A Modest Proposal: A Place for Women in the Hierarchy,” Commonweal, June 14, 1996, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/modest-proposal.