Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas

In 2011, Floyd-Thomas co-edited two books with Miguel A. De La Torre titled Beyond the Pale—one subtitled Reading Ethics from the Margins (exploring twenty-four classic ethicists and philosophers from a Christian liberationist perspective), the other Reading Theology from the Margins (looking at thirty classic theologians) Her most recent publication co-authored with Juan M. Floyd-Thomas and Mark G. Toulouse, is entitled The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.

Floyd-Thomas served as primary author/editor for other books. Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society collects various essays from many leading Womanist scholars and Womanist allies. Black Church Studies: An Introduction is a textbook that covers a range of disciplines that make up the interdisciplinary field of Black Church Studies. In 2010, she co-edited with theologian Anthony B. Pinn "Liberation Theologies in the United States: An Introduction."

Floyd-Thomas received her Ph.D. from Temple University in 1998. Her primary teacher and adviser was Katie Geneva Cannon. Cannon, a former student of Beverly Harrison, continues to mentor and influence Floyd-Thomas' work and pedagogical style.

The Black Religious Scholars Group is an organization founded by Floyd-Thomas, her husband Juan Floyd-Thomas, and Duane Belgrave while graduate students. It was conceptualized during a session of the Black Theology Group during the 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The mission of the organization is to "promote meaningful dialogue and partnership between black religious scholars, the larger black community and its churches and community organizations in order to promote the goals of black religion—namely, liberation and human fulfillment in all areas of life.

They found such a frame in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Walker defined "Womanist" in a four-part definition, that set the black female experience in contradistinction to both white women and black men. Using this frame, Womanist theology and ethics was born through the work of Cannon, Williams, and Grant.

In the early 1980s, Katie Geneva Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, and Delores Williams were students at Union Theological Seminary, whose teachers included James H. Cone, Beverly Harrison, and others. Just as Cone's black theology was noticeably absent of women's voices and experiences, Harrison's work centered around the perspective of white women. In both cases, the experiences of black women were subsumed into the experiences of either black men or white women. Cannon, Grant and Williams, while appreciating the work of early liberationists like Cone and Harrison, sought a way to frame their own experiences as black women.

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (born 1969) is an American author and educator. She is Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt Divinity School and the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Floyd-Thomas is a Womanist Christian social ethicist whose research interests include Womanist thought, Black Church Studies, liberation theology and ethics, critical race theory, critical pedagogy and postcolonial studies.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, theological education was fundamentally altered through the development of black theology, most notably the work of theologian James Hal Cone. Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, espoused a theological program that connected the black liberation struggle to the New Testament idea that God has a preferential option for the poor. Thus, God is "on the side of the oppressed."