You could say that ministry is something of a family business for Melanie Jones Quarles.
A third-generation Baptist preacher from the southside of Chicago, Quarles didn’t initially think she’d become a preacher.
“My parents and grandparents were heavily involved in ministry, but I didn’t think necessarily that would be my path,” says Quarles. “Divinity school certainly shaped that for me.”
After attaining her bachelor’s in economics and political science from Howard University, Quarles earned her master’s of divinity at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville and her Ph.D. in ethics, theology and human sciences from Chicago Theological Seminary. Following teaching stints at Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology, Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas, and Austin’s Seminary of the Southwest, Quarles moved to Richmond in 2019 to become Union Presbyterian Seminary’s Director of the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership.
In 1974, Cannon was the first African American woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church. A leading womanist and Black theological thinker, Cannon’s works were formative to theology as a whole. She founded the Center for Womanist Leadership in 2018 before her death later that year; it has since been renamed in her honor.
Womanism is a critical theoretical approach and social movement that centers the experiences and perspectives of Black women. Forty years ago, Black women religious scholars adapted Alice Walker’s framing of the term “womanist,” which is rooted in a Black Southern colloquial folk expression, to construct womanist theology.
Quarles’ first book, “Up Against a Crooked Gospel: Black Women’s Bodies and the Politics of Redemption,” is a womanist reading of Luke 13, the narrative of the bent woman in the Bible; she compares this to her grandmother’s lived experience as a migrant domestic worker who spent the last quarter of her life bent over.
Presently, Quarles is working on a book about Cannon’s life and scholarship.
“She was the very first person to adapt Walker’s term, womanist, and use it was a way of publishing in the theological academy,” Quarles explains.
More than a decade ago, Quarles co-founded the Millennial Womanism Project, an effort to understand why millennials are leaving religion. The project gathers womanist voices to discuss their relationship with faith and justice.
When she’s not spreading the womanist gospel, Quarles enjoys reading and visiting sites and spaces around the city that have meaning to her, such as Austin Miles’ murals of Black women and Kehinde Wiley’s “Rumors of War” sculpture at the VMFA.
“Richmond is a city that has quite a bit of charm,” she says.
