When a bishop placed his hand on my head to ordain me twenty-one years ago, a palpable weight left its impression. I had read Rosemary Radford Ruether on the myth of apostolic succession, so it was not the full heft of the tradition bearing down on me: it was instead the gravitas of a dozen words spoken by Bishop C. Joseph Sprague in his sermon a few moments earlier. “Preach what you learned in seminary! Teach what you learned in seminary!” he charged, addressing the gap between graduate theological education and the pew. I felt burdened because I suspected that the church might not be ready to hear the feminist, womanist, mujerista, and all other manner of emancipatory theology I had learned at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

To this day, when I am asked my favorite theologians, I glide past good choices such as Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Ricoeur to emancipatory thinkers like Letty Russell, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Katie Cannon, Ada-María Isasi-Díaz, and Marjorie Suchocki, to whom Ruether introduced me.

Real lives are the starting place of theology. In my brief first career as a journalist, I had encountered the underside of real life up-close: a young woman's raped body thrown away in a canal; the regular incidence of sexual abuse against children in the daily police log; one particularly terrifying testimony during a rape trial.