Thea Bowman: Faithful and Free
With every passing year since her death in 1990, more people are recognizing Sister Thea Bowman as one of the most inspiring figures in American Catholic history. This granddaughter of slaves became Catholic on her own initiative at the age of nine. As a Franciscan sister, she lived a wide-ranging ministry of joy, music, and justice. Now Father Maurice Nutt offers a new biography of Sister Thea that introduces her and sheds new light on who she was. Drawing on careful research and the insights of people who were close to her, Nutt explores her personality, her passion, her mission, and her prayer. He captures Thea Bowman as she was: an unapologetically African American woman, a religious sister who deeply loved God and the people to whom she ministered through teaching, preaching, and singing, and who embraced the blessing of her ancestry, the wisdom of the “old folks,” and a passion for justice and equality for all God’s children.
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this is a book for class and I am not sure if I am going to write a full post on it or not. I will do that after the class if I do. This is a light biography, one designed for inspiration. I like reading biographies like that because I want to be inspired and not everything has to be heavy. That being said, Thea Bowman is a fascinating character and I would like to read a more thorough biography. It is not that this left details out, but that it wasn't as much depth to her thought as I would have liked.
I do find it interesting that as a nun, she was a professor of preaching and designed a pastoral preparation program that was particularly designed for training priests (mostly white) to work in black Catholic parishes. And she did this in the 1980s.
I am also fascinated that she is approximately the same age as John Perkins and that they grew up less than an hour apart and both came back to Mississippi after time away (in Wisconson and Washington DC for Bowman and California for Perkins) to work in very practical ways with the Black community and against the racism of MS in the 1960-70s. Perkins was in Mendenhall and Jackson and Bowman was in Canton and Jackson. And I can't imagine that they didn't have some interaction at some point. John Perkins is still living, although in his 90s now and Thea Bowman died of cancer in 1990.