Former Congresswoman from Texas, Barbara Jordan, persistently insisted that the first three words of the U.S. Constitution's Preamble, “We the people,” call us to our best selves. Her witness will help us to explore the relationship between faith and citizenship. And the poetry of Sonia Sanchez will echo through out by asking us to think, in a variety of ways, does your house have lions?

Emilie M. Townes, Ph.D., is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale Divinity School. Previously she was the Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. Townes is in line to assume the Presidency of the American Academy of Religion at the end of 2007. She is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches.

Her first two major works, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (1993) and In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (1995) were seminal texts in construction of the field of womanist theology, broadly defined as a field of theological and ethical reflection in which the historic and present-day insights of African American women are brought into critical engagement with the traditions of Christian theology.