This panel brings together diverse feminist theological perspectives to interrogate the meaning of freedom in the face of systemic religious, cultural, and political oppression. Through papers grounded in womanist theology, Indigenous feminist practice, fat liberation hermeneutics, and psychological theory, presenters explore how bodies, identities, and belief systems intersect in both liberative and restrictive ways. Topics range from Harriet Tubman’s visionary spirituality to the role of music in shaping U.S. civil religio-political discourse, and from challenges to reproductive labor ideology in Christian liturgy to the struggles of Indigenous women navigating faith and recognition in the American South. One paper examines how a holistic doctoral program fosters theological and personal flourishing among women scholars, revealing new insights through Self-Determination Theory. Together, these papers offer creative, critical, and embodied approaches to advancing gender justice, religious freedom, and collective liberation—calling us to reimagine freedom as deeply relational, spiritual, and grounded in lived experience.
Anti-freedom and freedom movements are intrinsically intertwined, exemplified in current US political imaginaries and praxis that impede or empower freedom. In myriad ways, US civil religion perennially re/constructs an exclusionary or an inclusive worldview of “we, the people” in the US body politic. Music participates in US religio-political discourse and praxis about identity and envisions alternative possible futures. Music constitutes and signifies a sharp contrast between repressive and liberative notions of freedom, symbolized in current civil religiously-based authoritarian regimes and solidarity movements. Historically rooted in abolitionist, suffragist, and multiple subsequent social justice movements, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” played an unexpected prominent religio-political role in the 2025 US presidential inaugural event and counterinaugural protests. This paper analyzes and juxtaposes how this hymn was re-cited and re-construed in both President Trump’s inauguration and in the Women’s March-sponsored People’s March to advance either state-sponsored violence or intersectional visions of liberation, respectively.
Examining the role of the visions within the life of Harriet Tubman, this paper connects insights from womanist theology and Black feminism to describe a theology of freedom.
Engaging with feminist theologians’ work, such as Fat Church by Anastasia E.B. Kidd, and fat liberation work from Hannah Bacon, this paper will further demonstrate the need for freedom from paternalistic systems that continue to oppress bodies, especially fat bodies. Implementing extant work from fat liberation theologies, and looking to the biblical text, this paper proposes a new hermeneutical lens—a Liberative Body Hermeneutic, which gives primacy to the form of the body—as a means of understanding the will of God toward all bodies, but specifically fat bodies. If we are to free bodies from systemic control, and make a theological argument concerning this liberation, one must interrogate the biblical text toward an understanding of what lies within. This hermeneutic will provide a means to read scripture that allows the reader to see the text with new eyes—eyes of freedom for all bodies.
Native American communities in the American South face administrative and public invisibility. For the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina, cultural revitalization is tied to struggles for recognition, land protection, and religious freedom. Native Christianity serves as both political protection and a complicating factor in recognition efforts. This paper explores how Edisto women leverage an Indigenous Christian feminism to navigate political and spiritual identity. By appealing to Pentecostal Christianity, they assert sovereignty on their own terms. Through long-term community-based research, this study examines how gender, religion, and political recognition intersect in the Edisto’s fight for self-determination.
This paper details the context and findings of exploratory research investigating how women undertaking doctoral research in theology characterise the impact on their freedom to flourish of a holistic project which supports and explicitly addresses the intersectionality of their academic, spiritual and personal lives. Conceiving feminist research as spiritual practice, and females as marginalised in the academy and faith communities, it evaluates the project using Self Determination Theory: a psychological, empirically driven, organismic motivational meta-theory, rarely engaged with by feminist or practical theologians. Measures and theories of SDT are used directly or inform multiple types of qualitative and quantitative data gathering from project participants. Data analysis will identify the project’s support or thwarting of three essential ‘nutriments’ of autonomy, competence and relatedness that SDT posits as essential to human flourishing, and propose emerging insights and questions from dialogue between these ‘nutriments’ and feminist discourses around women’s self-authenticity, agency and relationality.
Despite the American ideal of “liberty for all,” work remains to definitively establish within our law and culture that people with female reproductive systems are equally free. In particular, after the fall of Roe, the targeted state domination and economic exploitation of this group for its reproductive labor power are of grave concern. As hegemonic ideology is a crucial point of intervention, this paper commends and builds upon the work of feminist liturgical scholars, who have long charged that Christian Eucharist liturgy constructs women as colonized reproductive laborers for a Father God. Analyzing content and ritual actions in a specific instance of contemporary Advent liturgy, it underscores the renewed urgency of worship problems raised decades ago and illustrates the type of work needed on a larger scale, both to dislodge the unjust cultural common sense about reproduction culturally and to advance feminist, liberatory re-formation of Christian worship.