WATERtalk Follow-Up
Making the Road As We Go
A conversation with author Jeanette Stokes
Sponsored by WATER (Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual) and the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South
February 8, 2023
Wednesday, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm EST
Video is located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnrdfQ3nS1E
Mary E. Hunt, Presiding
I am Mary E. Hunt, co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual. I am in the WATER office in Silver Spring, MD, with the other co-director, Diann Neu, and our staff colleagues Pamela Miller, an MDiv student at Wesley Theological Seminary, and Patrice Rupp from Germany who is with us for the year as part of the Church of the Brethren Volunteer Program.
We are delighted to co-sponsor this event with our sister organization the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South of which Jeanette Stokes is the founding director.
A land acknowledgement: We at WATER are on indigenous land in Silver Spring, Maryland. This is on the traditional and contemporary land of the Piscataway and Anacostan peoples. We acknowledge the trauma and injustice toward indigenous people that is deep in U.S. culture and history. We join in efforts to eradicate it and make reparations for the genocide involved. WATER’s work is aimed to bring about social justice. Consider the native people on whose land you sit.
WATER’s work brings feminist/womanist spiritual values and intellectual work to efforts at social change. Jeanette’s book makes clear that the Center’s work, indeed her deepest commitments, are to creating a just and sustainable world.
Introduction of Jeanette Stokes
Jeanette Stokes and I met at Grailville in Loveland, Ohio in the summer of 1976. She was a student at Duke Divinity School. I had finished Harvard Divinity School and gone on to study at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. It was a summer to remember because of the U.S. bi-centennial celebration. For us, it was memorable because we were part of a unique and life-changing summer program for women studying theology.
We all came from little cohorts of feminists in theological education around the country, so we were thrilled to meet one another. We had the good fortune of living for 6 weeks at Grailville, a women’s farm and conference center, in the company of the women of the Grail and with some of the great feminist theologians of our time—Nelle Morton, Rosemary Radford Ruether, among others over the several years that the program existed. We participants became our own and one another’s teachers, and we had great fun. We returned to our respective institutions to challenge the patriarchal status quo, work we continue to do to this day.
Jeanette Stokes was born into a white, Presbyterian, economically privileged family in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She studied at Smith College and Duke Divinity School.
Her life’s work to date has focused on the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, a feminist non-profit that includes religion, the arts, social justice, and much more. She has written countless columns for their newsletter “South of the Garden,” compiled and published three collections of these, as well as penned three memoirs and a book on writing.
She is an ordained Presbyterian minister who is frank about the boringly outdated beliefs so many people still cling to out of habit. She is an artist and a gardener. Mostly, I know her as a dear friend and stalwart colleague to whom I turn for ideas, advice, and common sense.
Jeanette’s Remarks can be found on the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnrdfQ3nS1E
She told the story of this book, beginning with the title, Making the Road As We Go, which describes how she has felt throughout her theological work, always making something new. She described her parents, her growing up years in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her college years at Smith College, including a year at Amherst College, a men’s school, that strengthened her feminist commitment. Jeanette moved to Durham, NC, to go to Duke Divinity School in 1974 where she became the director of the Women’s Center.
Jeanette detailed the Grailville experience, Seminary Quarter at Grailville, in 1976 where she met the Grail, a Catholic-founded, later interreligious women’s group dedicated to social justice, spiritual search, and the arts. Her portrait of Janet Kalven is a wonderful example of Jeanette’s verve as an observer/writer!
Feminism and religion became her field of choice. She began to write her own theology, empowering other women to do the same. Helen Crotwell, a university chaplain, had a deep influence on her. God-images, sexist language, and patriarchal patterns of ministry were part of Jeanette’s portfolio after she finished seminary in 1977. The needs of women in ministry shaped the contours of the emerging Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South (RSWMS) which was born in August 1977.
The newsletter, “South of the Garden,” is a valuable resource for programs and projects. It started in October 1978 and continues to this writing in 2023.
Programs began with the needs of women in ministry, especially those who were put upon by their denominations. Programs have expanded to include creativity, spirituality, and social justice. Participants come from various generations, are queer and straight, and have varying relationships to religion.
Current work includes anti-racism workshops, a Reading Race group for white women, and sharing organizational support with people of color. A quilting conference, a film, and programs on creativity are among the upcoming plans. See
www.rcwms.org for details.
Conversation Ensued:
Our Sister Centers and their leaders were recognized:
Sandra Smith, Holy Ground in Asheville, NC
Nancy Richardson, Women’s Theological Center, Boston, MA
Melanie Morrison, The Leaven Center, Lyons, MI
- One participant praised the work of the RCWMS on issues related to aging. She went on to ask about ‘what’s next’ in terms of challenges.
Jeanette Stokes (JS) talked about how LGBTIQ+ people are experiencing backlash. Nurturing people to keep at this work, bringing younger people into the struggles for justice, and helping them not to get discouraged are among the tasks. RCWMS has interns who are engaged in justice struggles.
- Another person told of her relationship to the Center which helped her with her own burn-out in the Presbyterian system.
- A third speaker thanked Jeanette and Company for persisting. She asked JS to share a kernel of wisdom and what changed JS the most. JS replied that she learned from Rosemary Radford Ruether not to look at an Eden of the past or a Heaven in the future, but that each has to make a revolution for our generation. JS sees the task of elders to lead folks in our generation and support younger people. She also said it is important to stick with issues, friends, and family over the long haul.
- How to sustain oneself in the process was one person’s query of JS. JS agreed that women’s writing weeks and other such community-building events nurture people. “When we run out of people, ideas and money we’ll stop.” Happily for all of us, that hasn’t happened yet to the RCWMS.
- The influence of Black women/womanist theologians was enormous in JS’ work. The addition of many voices in the theological conversation, especially womanist theologians, have made a real difference to JS.
WATER is grateful to Jeanette Stokes and to the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South for the book, for this wonderful conversation, and for sisterly collaboration that enriches us all.
