You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet.

I'm Pete Ends.

And I'm Jared Bias.

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the podcast, which is a reissue of our

interview with Emily Towns from way back in November of 2020.

And it's called The Wisdom of Hope, and this episode is full of both of those things. Enjoy.

Today we're talking about The Wisdom of Hope, and we're talking about that with Emily Towns,

the Dean of the Divinity School and Distinguished Professor of Womenist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt

University. Oh man folks, I'm telling you, this is one of these podcasts that started out one

thing and it wound up being something very, very different and very great and very beautiful,

where we just sort of woven, actually Emily woven, community, Bible, love, messiness of communities,

and a lot of wisdom and it was just a great time having her talk about this stuff. It was just

wonderful. It's nice when things don't turn out the way you plan. Yeah. That's it. I think it's

exactly right. And it actually fits in exactly with some of the themes we talk about in that messiness

of community when things don't go as planned. Right. Well let's get into it. Let's do that.

More often than not, we undersell the Bible, mostly out of our fear and our doubts.

I don't know, rather than taking it as an opportunity to dive right in there and try,

as I say, wrestle with it in community to see what we come up with. Emily, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for joining us. Well thank you for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you Emily. So let's

just begin by defining what womanist ethics is. That's going to be a new term for a number of our

listeners and it would be really great to just define it. And maybe where it came from. Yeah,

and work like it's origins and things like that. There is a somewhat of a debate among people

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