That setting was a weekly study class at her church, for which she served as recording secretary. “My appetite for reading and studying the Bible came along just about the time I was a teenager, when I started taking reading seriously, and it was awakened in a setting that augured the work I ’d embark on as my life ’s journey, ” she wrote. She was an avid reader, and recalled in Listening for God that her true spiritual awakening did not come in the revival tents of the Pentecostal creed. It was a deeply religious family, and Weems grew up steeped in the exuberant, yet strict Pentecostal faith. Weems ’s father remarried his children ’s Sunday-school teacher, and the couple had several more children. “I have flip-flopped over the years between being angry at God (the gods) for allowing my mother to abandon me, ” she admits, “and blaming myself for not being the kind of daughter a mother would want to stay and protect. Despite having buried the painful memory, Weems writes that the day continues to shape her life. In her 1999 book, Listening for God: A Minister ’s Journey Through Silence and Doubt, she describes the day in 1967 when her mother took a taxi across town, but says she does not remember if she was home to witness this, nor any of the other details.
She was one of several children her mother drank heavily and then abandoned the family when Weems was 12 years old. An elder in the African Methodist Episcopal church, she teaches at Vanderbilt University ’s Divinity School and has been ranked in an Ebony poll as one of the most respected black women clergy members in the United States.īorn in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 26, 1954, Weems had a difficult early childhood. Weems is a minister, Old Testament scholar, and author of several books that examine religion from a feminist point of view.
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