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| |  BEVERLY HARRISON –
“foremother of feminist social ethics,” according to the New York Times – joined the Union faculty in 1966 and soon thereafter became Dean of Women Students. Her inaugural address as full professor in 1979 entitled, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love: Christian Ethics for Women and Other Strangers,” is considered one of the most influential feminist texts of our time and has been translated into more than 10 languages. She published Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion in 1983, and in 1986 became CarolynWilliams Beaird Profession of Christian Ethics.
“The reason” Harrison first came to Union in 1954 as a student, she recalled in her oral history. “was my beloved professor,” Robert McAfee Brown [’45] with whom she had studied at [Minnesota’s] Macalaster College. (Brown taught at Union in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.) She goes on to say, “Theological scholarship is to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the tradition.” Harrison says there is not just one Christian tradition. “It’s always multi-cultural, pluralistic, and multilayered. The theologian is to discern what in the tradition in the past is to be highlighted for living in the present, what has to be either repudiated actively or let go for a time…,” she continues.…”My theological hope? God is with us; this I know.... As [Peruvian theologian Gustavo] Gutierrez says: ‘Justice is the face of God.’ And if you lose the longing for justice, you can’t see God.” Harrison says that theological liberals “put love above justice.…I believe that you have love and justice together or you don’t have either.”
Harrison is an active member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), along with Professor Delores Williams.
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