This festschrift, Voices of Feminist Liberation, which gathers together essays from fourteen former doctoral students who worked with me, is a most gratifying tribute to my work of teaching and writing over forty-five years. These scholars, themselves now teachers and writers in the midst of their own careers, studied with me at several academic institutions – at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where I taught for twenty-seven years, from 1975 to 2002; at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where I held a special five-year appointment from 1999 to 2005; and at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, where I have been teaching since 2005. The editors of this collection, Emily Leah Silverman, Dirk von der Horst, and Whitney Bauman, have done a remarkable job of contacting these scholars who have worked with me over the years and bringing together a coherent group of essays under the three themes of “The Crucible of Experience and the Life of Dialogue,” “Legacies of Colonialism and Resistance,” and “Angles on Ecofeminism.” These three topics point to creative intersections where my scholarly and social activist concerns interconnect with each of their own life work as writers, teachers and moral agents.

For me, these scholars, now teaching in institutions across the US from Florida, South Carolina and Boston to the Midwest and West Coast represent far more than former students whom I taught in classes and whose dissertations I helped advise. They are a network of colleagues and friends who continue to enrich my life as I interact with their ongoing work and lives.