Overview

What do we do with wounds--our own, others', and a nation's? We can turn away, avert our gaze. We can make a spectacle of suffering. Or like the doubting disciple who longed to touch Jesus's side, we can acquaint ourselves with the wounds: both the story they tell and the healing they prefigure. In The Wounds Are the Witness, Yolanda Pierce, dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School and author of In My Grandmother's House, weaves together her own memories, vignettes from Black life, and scenes from scripture, especially the passion of Christ. To work for liberation in a broken world, we cannot look away from crucified flesh. Bones from the Middle Passage, GI Bill benefits denied to Black veterans, women inmates shackled while giving birth: we must take all such wounds seriously. They testify to both the pain and the faith of a people. With the lyrical eye of a poet and the moral precision of a preacher, Pierce casts readers into the astounding story of God's healing. From the curative powers of a spiderweb to the work of justice in history, politics, medicine, higher education, and the Black church, Pierce asks: Where are the remedies for the battered and broken? What does accountability look like? Is there any cure? Healing takes time, Pierce writes, and even the wounds of the risen Christ do not immediately close. When the wounds become the witness, we find a faith reimagined and a hope transfigured. They tell the truth: about the extent of the injury and the extraordinary work of healing. ""The Wounds Are the Witness is where Teilhard de Chardin meets Beyoncé, as Pierce takes the world to church with sacred speech that transforms trauma, heals hurts, rejoices in justice, and celebrates spirit. In this brilliant book, we hear the testimony of arguably the greatest interpreter of religion for the thinking public in our present age.""--Michael Eric Dyson

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Yolanda Pierce is professor and dean of Howard University School of Divinity. She is a scholar of African American religious history, womanist theology, race, and religion, as well as a public theologian, activist, and commentator. An alumna of Princeton University and Cornell University, Pierce served as the founding director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Pierce's writing has appeared in Time, Sojourners, and the Christian Century, and she is the author of the book Hell Without Fires. Pierce lives in Washington, DC.

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