BUSTH Community Members share Inspiration during Women’s History Month
The following is an excerpt from the article “The Women who Inspire Us” featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Religion and Black Studies Emilie M. Townes and STM student Greta Gaffin (’23,’26), published on March 16, 2025 by BU Today.
Each March, the nation celebrates Women’s History Month, honoring the vital role of women in American history. The theme for this year’s observance is “Moving Forward Together! Women Educating & Inspiring Generations,” and to acknowledge the enduring legacy of women, BU Today invited members of the BU community to write short essays about the women who have inspired them.
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Katie Geneva Cannon moved from icon to mentor to colleague to friend in the years I knew her, before she died far too soon, in 2018. For young Black women like me in the late 1970s and 1980s, who were entering seminaries and did not have very many role models that looked like us, Cannon, the first Black woman to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church US and one of the key figures who founded the academic discipline now known as Womanist Ethics and Theology, was someone I and others could hold onto as we were making our way through master’s programs and, eventually, doctoral programs. Cannon had a way of inviting you to join her as she looked beyond your affect and words to probe your inner life and invite your ideas and hopes to see the light of day. It is impossible to say how many lives she touched in this way. But she gave us a model for what mentoring can and should look like and the importance of passing it along to the generations a-coming.
Emilie M. Townes, Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor of Religion and Black Studies, School of Theology
Katheryn Darr, Harrell F. Beck Professor of Hebrew Scripture at BU’s Shool of Theology, is an amazingly knowledgeable professor about the Hebrew Bible, but what makes her inspiring to me is not just her knowledge, but that she got where she is in an extremely male-dominated field. A woman getting a professorship in Biblical studies at a prominent school of theology in the 1980s was no mean feat.
When I came to STH everyone warned us first years about how tough her class was, and it was true. But we learned a lot. I appreciate a female professor who will keep high expectations when so often female faculty are expected to be soft and easy. What I also appreciated was that she was quick to stand up for women in the Bible. One of the things I most remember was her telling us that the “temple prostitutes” in Hosea were a metaphor for Israel’s idolatry, and that we should ignore scholarship that acted like this was real.
Greta Gaffin (STH’23,’26)