Isabel Carter Heyward (born 1945) is an American
feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
theologian and priest in the
Episcopal Church, the province of the worldwide
Anglican Communion
The Anglican Communion is the third largest Christian communion after the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Founded in 1867 in London, the communion has more than 85 million members within the Church of England and other ...
in the United States. In 1974, she was one of the
Philadelphia Eleven, eleven women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976.
Early life
Heyward was born on August 22, 1945, in
Charlotte
Charlotte ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 census, making Charlotte the 16th-most populo ...
,
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
. She grew up in
Hendersonville, North Carolina. She graduated from
East Mecklenburg High School
East Mecklenburg High School is a public secondary school in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States, and one of 21 high schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools system. The principal of the school is Richard "Rick" Parker. East Mecklenburg ...
in 1963.
[The Archive of Women in Theological Scholarship](_blank)
Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary (biographical details to 1998). For further details, se
Academic career
Heyward holds the degree of
Bachelor of Arts
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...
from
Randolph-Macon Woman's College
Randolph College is a private liberal arts and sciences college in Lynchburg, Virginia. Founded in 1891 as Randolph-Macon Woman's College, it was renamed on July 1, 2007, when it became coeducational.
The college offers 32 majors; 42 minors; â ...
(now Randolph College) in
Lynchburg,
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
, the degree of
Master of Arts
A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...
in the
comparative study of religion from
Columbia University
Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
, and that of
Master of Divinity
For graduate-level theological institutions, the Master of Divinity (MDiv, ''magister divinitatis'' in Latin) is the first professional degree of the pastoral profession in North America. It is the most common academic degree in seminaries and divi ...
in religion and psychiatry from
Union Theological Seminary. She was awarded a
Doctor of Philosophy
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common Academic degree, degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields ...
degree in
systematic theology
Systematic theology, or systematics, is a discipline of Christian theology that formulates an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the doctrines of the Christian faith. It addresses issues such as what the Bible teaches about certain topi ...
in 1980 for her work on redemption in the thought of two early Christian thinkers. She taught at
Episcopal Divinity School
The Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) is a theological school in New York City that trains students for service with the Episcopal Church. It is affiliated with the Union Theological Seminary. Students who enroll in the EDS at Union Anglican st ...
in
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
,
, from 1975, and was Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology there until she retired in 2006. The inaugural Carter Heyward Scholars Lecture was given at the college in her honor in October 2006. She received the Distinguished Alumni/ae Award from Union Theological Seminary in 1998.
Theology
Nature of God
Author of a number of books and numerous articles, Heyward's most distinctive theological idea is that it is open to each of us to incarnate God (that is, to embody God's power), and that we do so most fully when we seek to relate genuinely to others in what she calls "relationality". When we do this, we are said to be "godding", a verb Heyward herself coined. God is defined in her work as "our power in mutual relation". Alluding to mainstream Christian views of God, Heyward has stated "I am not much of a theist". For her, "the shape of God is justice", so human activity can, as theologian Lucy Tatman has observed, be divine activity whenever it is just and loving. In her book ''Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right'', Heyward asserts that "the love we make ... is God's own love". In Heyward's work, God is therefore not a personal figure, but instead the ground of being, seen for example in compassionate action, which is "the movement of God in and through the heights and depths of all that is".
Jesus
Again in contrast to the more traditional Christian focus (on
Jesus Christ
Jesus, likely from he, יֵש×וּעַ, translit=YÄ“Å¡Å«aÊ¿, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious ...
as God incarnated as a redeemer), Heyward believes that "God was indeed in Jesus just as God is in ''us'' – as our Sacred, Sensual Power, deeply infusing our flesh, root of our embodied yearning to reach out to one another". This power works to change despair, fear and apathy to hope, courage and what Heyward terms "justice-love". But God's Spirit is not contained "solely in one human life or religion or historical event or moment". God was Jesus' relational power for "forging right (mutual) relation, in which Jesus himself and those around him were empowered to be more fully who they were called to be". Insisting on the God-incarnating power of all, Heyward observes that "the human act of love, befriending, making justice is our act of making God incarnate in the world". In her recent work she suggests that even the non-human creation may incarnate God, commenting that "there are more faces of Jesus on earth, throughout history and all of nature, than we can begin even to imagine". Not unrelated to this perception, Heyward founded the Free Rein Center for Therapeutic Horseback Riding and Education at
Brevard, North Carolina, where she is an instructor
Task of theology
A consequence of this dynamic view of God and Christ is that truth is evolving, not static. A hint of this can be seen in Heyward's approval of
Dorothee Sölle
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle (, 1929–2003), known as Dorothee Sölle, was a German liberation theologian who coined the term "Christofascism". She was born in Cologne and died at a conference in Göppingen from cardiac arrest.
Life and career
...
's remark that God's Spirit works through "revolutionary patience". This leaves a certain openness to the church's work of proclaiming the truth of Christ: there is an insistence that "we who currently constitute the Christian church are the temporary authors and guardians of 'Christian truth'. It is ours to determine and ours to tend". So the theologian's task involves "a capacity to discern God's presence here and now and to reflect on what this means", and is part of a communal effort and struggle to enable the flourishing of love and justice in a world where the potential for relationality is broken, often violently. The project of "godding", or relationality, then, is an alternative to an authoritarian understanding of social/relational power, both inside and outside the church. Mutual relationship entails a willingness to participate in healing a broken world, and so is not (Lucy Tatman notes) a private or individualistic task.
Heyward sees her own task within this broader program as working particularly for the expansion of the church to include people who have historically been left out. In short, the theologian's task is to help bring a greater measure of redemption to the world. Though that task is always concrete, the precise shape it takes depends on the exact "shape of the evil from which people need to be redeemed". On her home page at Episcopal Divinity School, Heyward's wrote that her passion as a theological educator was to enable students to "do theology at its roots: making connections between their daily lives, their relationships and work, their faith and politics – and those of others, past and present, those like them, and those unlike them. The only theology worth doing is that which inspires and transforms lives, that which empowers us to participate in creating, liberating, and blessing the world."
Bibliography
Heyward is the author of some eleven books and has edited / contributed to a further three. She is the author of numerous scholarly and more mainstream articles. An appreciation of Heyward's work can be found in chapter five of Lucy Tatman's 2001 book ''Knowledge That Matters: A Feminist Theological Paradigm and Epistemology'' (London: Sheffield Academic Press).
Heyward was also the author of ''When Boundaries Betray Us (1993)'', which was a source of controversy. Some read it superficially as an account of Heyward falling in love with her therapist or simply a bad match between therapist and client. Others read it as a critique of the structure of traditional psychoanalytic therapy for its skewed power-imbalance. Over time and two editions, the latter interpretation has prevailed among many serious psychotherapists.
In 2014 she co-edited with Janine Lehane ''The Spirit of the Lord Is upon Me: The Writings of Suzanne Hiatt'' (Seabury Books, NY). Sue was a key figure among the Philadelphia Eleven and an "unofficial bishop" to many a woman ordinand and/or deacon in the United States and abroad.
See also
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Mary E. Hunt
References
Footnotes
Works cited
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Further reading
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Heyward, Carter
1945 births
American Episcopal priests
American Episcopal theologians
American feminists
Christian feminist theologians
Episcopal Divinity School faculty
Women Anglican clergy
Lesbian academics
Lesbian feminists
LGBT Anglican clergy
LGBT people from North Carolina
Liberation theologians
Living people
People from Charlotte, North Carolina
People from Hendersonville, North Carolina
Randolph–Macon College alumni
Union Theological Seminary (New York City) alumni
21st-century LGBT people