Keep Your Courage

Book excerpt: Carter Heyward is one of the most influential and controversial theologians of our time. Under headings "Speaking Truth to Power," Remembering Who We Are," and "Celebrating Our Friends," she reflects on how movements for gender and sexual justice reverberate globally. In this volume of occasional pieces, the lesbian feminist theologian bears witness to the sacred struggles to topple oppressive power. These pieces illustrate feminist theology's bold and transformative engagement of its cultural, political, social, and theological contexts. "Now forty years later, while not as naïve and utopian in my politics, I am still enthusiastically committed, as a Christian, to struggles dedicated to building a world in which every person is entitled, by law, to basic human rights. I have come to realize, as I move along into my mid-sixties, that what justice-loving people most need in these times, and in all times, is courage to speak and act on behalf of this world. My desire in this book is to spark such courage and stir imagination." -from the Foreword.