Partner Carter Heyward
Queer Places:
Redbud Springs, 56 Redbud Cir, Brevard, NC 28712
Dr. Beverly Jean Wildung Harrision
(August 4, 1932 - December 15, 2012), internationally renowned scholar and teacher of Christian social ethics and feminist theory, was born on August 4, 1932, in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was the fourth child of Harold Wildung and Adahlia Knodt. She graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul in 1954 and received her Master of Religious Education and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Dr. Harrison also received honorary doctorates from Macalester College in 2006 and Chicago Theological Seminary in 2010.
A lifelong Presbyterian who worked as an associate campus minister at University of California in Berkeley in the 1960s, Beverly Harrison increasingly devoted less of her professional time to organized religion and more of her energy to networks of religious feminists who emerged with irrepressible faith, strong intellect, and passionate commitment in the 1970s and 1980s.
Regarded widely by her graduate students and colleagues throughout the world as the “mother of Christian feminist ethics,” Dr. Harrison’s ground-breaking book on abortion, Our Right to Choose (1983) continues to be heralded by theological students and religious scholars for its fine-tuned feminist methodology and its thesis that women’s reproductive freedom is essential to not only women’s lives but moreover to the strength and integrity of the entire social order.
Dr. Harrison’s second book, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics (edited by Carol S. Robb, 1985), was another major contribution to the emerging field of feminist ethics and theory. One of the essays in it, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” an adaptation of Dr. Harrison’s inaugural address as Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Seminary in 1980, has been translated into at least eight languages and is considered by religious ethics scholars and feminist leaders throughout the world to be one of the most influential feminist essays ever produced by a religious scholar. Her third book, Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (2004), which was published after her retirement in collaboration with six of her former graduate students, collected significant essays together in a final volume of her writings.
Beverly Harrison was on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary from 1967 until her retirement in 1999. In addition to working with several generations of students in Christian feminist ethics, Dr. Harrison lectured widely throughout this time. She was visiting scholar in theological settings in places throughout the world, including Uppsala, Seoul, Zurich, Hamburg, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Canberra, and Auckland.
In 2006, Our Right to Choose was published in Spanish and a celebration of this book was held in Mexico City by a Latin American chapter of Catholics for Choice, with Dr. Harrison as featured guest. In 2007, she received an award for her outstanding work by the American Academy of Religion’s Women’s Caucus. In January 2013, Dr. Harrision posthumously received the Society of Christian Ethics “Lifetime Achievement” Award, the second ever recipient of this distinguished recognition. She served as President of this organization in 1983, the first woman to hold this office. Throughout her career, Dr. Harrison was an active member of the Feminist Ethics Consultation of which she was a founder in the 1970s.
In addition to her work in the field of reproductive rights and human sexuality, Dr. Harrison wrote and taught extensively in the field of economic ethics. As she continued to be attuned to the interests and scholarship of her colleagues, she became increasingly involved in environmental studies as they intersect with economic, racial, sexual, and gender issues. As important to her legacy as her written work and teaching, Beverly Harrison's mentoring of younger scholars in feminist ethics has been publicly acknowledged and celebrated in various ways and places since her retirement. The President of Union Seminary reported that she has never received such an outpouring of response to any message as she did to her announcement of Beverly Harrison's death.
For more than thirty years, Dr. Harrison and her beloved life companion and theological colleague
Carter Heyward collaborated in workshops, classes, and publications. Drs. Harrison and Heyward were among the co-authors of God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (1985). In it the authors argued that the basis of theological education and Christian theology needed to shift significantly so as to include the lives, experiences, and intellectual contributions of women of all classes, races and cultures.
In retirement, Beverly Harrison joined Carter Heyward and several other women in forming an intentional residential community of women, “Redbud Springs,” in the mountains of North Carolina. During the last years of her life, Dr. Harrison helped found the Mountain Community of St. Clare, a small justice-based community of “recovering” Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and others. She remained active, insofar as she was able, in the work of justice. She was an enthusiastic member of the Democratic Party in Transylvania County and rejoiced in the re-election of President Obama.
During 2012, Dr. Harrison moved to a retirement community in Brevard, North Carolina, with her Pomeranian whom she considered her guardian angel. In August 2012, Beverly’s companions threw an 80th Birthday Bash for her at the Silvermont Mansion in Brevard. More than 100 family, friends, and former students showed up from places as far away as Montana and London to pay tribute to this woman for having touched and changed the lives of so many. Beverly Wildung Harrison died in Transylvania County Community Hospital in Brevard, North Carolina, on December 15, 2012. In addition to Carter Heyward and “Shelly Pom Pom,” she left behind the other members of Redbud Springs--Sue Sasser, Nancy Richards, Gerrie Kiley, and Jennifer Rouse--as well as countless close friends and associates throughout the world.
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