This book is the result of a collaborative effort on the part of a group of outstanding theologians, historians, and biblical scholars within the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. Clarifying for themselves and others the distinctive character of feminist interpretation, they continue the process of liberating the word that concerns the whole church.

Letty M. Russell was one of the world’s foremost feminist theologians and a longtime member of the faculty of Yale Divinity School. She died on July 12, 2007, at age 77. She was one of the first women ordained in the United Presbyterian Church and served as pastor of the Presbyterian Church of the Ascension in East Harlem for ten years. She joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School in 1974 and retired in 2001. She wrote and edited numerous books, including Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church, Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (with J. Shannon Clarkson), and Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective (with Kwok Pui Lan, Ada Maria Isasi Dias, and Katie Cannon).