Communities of Resistance and Solidarity

""How many times have we asked what would be an appropriate North American equivalent to the base communities and the liberation theology of Latin America? Now in Sharon Welch's fluent but solid book we have an answer. Drawing on a wide variety of philosophical and theological sources and viewing the whole from a critical feminist perspective, Welch suggests how subjugated forms of knowledge can be recuperated as human communities learn to support each other in resisting our socio-cultural death wish. A passionate and poetic book, which strikes a new chord in theology both in style and in substance."" --Harvey Cox, author of Religion in the Secular City ""In this book Sharon Welch contributes to a vital conversation, namely, in what sense feminist liberation theologians (for that matter, all honest theologians) must acknowledge both the relativist insights of their truth-claims and the ethically normative value of their work. This is a critical dialectic and Welch's theology helps sharpen it."" --Carter Heyward, Professor of Theology, Episcopal Divinity School ""Sharon Welch offers here not simply a feminist theology of liberation but a new way of doing theology as such. She brings together the resources of Christian faith, the creativity and passions of personal experience, and finely honed instruments of analysis found in Michel Foucault and Ernst Bloch. The results are exciting: 'dangerous memory,' 'genealogies of resistance,' 'poetics of revolution.' It would be difficult to read this work and continue to think in the usual ways about men and women, faith, power, theology, in fact, about anything."" --Edward Farley, Vanderbilt Divinity School ""Sharon Welch is the quintessential scholar/activist, one who has never let her devotion to the academy and signal accomplishments there preclude a profound commitment to changing the 'real world' in which we live."" --William F. Schulz, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA and President of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee ""I think of Welch as the best kind of activist/academic, and consider her a role model. Her recent focus on alternatives to the binary ways of thinking about morality and war/peace initiatives, and her honest explorations of the amoral character of religion are truly exciting. That she refuses to romanticize religious traditions--even as she attends with utter seriousness to the possibilities for liberative and humane possibilities for global life--gives Welch a kind of realistic wisdom unusual for an academic."" --Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Associate Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School Sharon Welch is a social ethicist who currently serves as Provost and Professor of Religion and Society at the Unitarian Universalist theological school in Chicago, Meadville Lombard. She has held positions as Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Adjunct Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Missouri from 1991-2007. She was assistant and then associate professor of Theology and Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School from 1982 to 1991. Welch is currently a member of the Social Enterprise Alliance, the Unitarian Universalist Peace Ministry Network, and a Fellow of the Institute for Humanist Studies. In her work as Provost, Welch has led in the development of a contextual model of theological education that is grounded in deep immersion in both the social and natural worlds that surround us and sustain us. Welch is the author of five books and numerous articles in the field of social ethics. She is the recipient of numerous awards, many of which recognize her