Biography
A’Dorian Murray-Thomas is a womanist theologian with particular interests in Black girlhood studies, social ethics, and political theology. A’Dorian is a 2025 Master of Divinity graduate of Union Theological Seminary. She is currently earning her Master of Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. A proud Newark, New Jersey native, she was recently ordained as a Minister at Newark’s historic Bethany Baptist Church. A’Dorian is a passionate advocate for youth and families, serving in local government as a County Commissioner and the founder of SHE Wins Inc., a leadership program created to serve girls affected by gun violence.
Paper Abstract
Construction of meals from scraps; preserving recipes inherited from ancestors enslaved; the unyielding will to make a way out of no way. These are the everyday marvels I’ve gathered from living, learning, and serving as a Black woman in an urban “food dessert”. Scholars like Katie Canon and Emilie Townes illumine the meaning-making from such womanist modes of being before and beyond the kitchen table. In the face of empire, where is God in the setting of the table? The preparation of the meal? The phenomenology of the consumer and the consumed? How do we account for the politics of affordability shaping what, how, where we eat, and with whom? In what ways do ancestral spiritualities shape and redefine womanist ways of being in meal-making, troubling the human-non-human binary by de-centering the anthropocene? Can a Black woman’s saying grace be deemed political? This paper will explore the politics of food justice from the lens of Black women, and other groups creating sustenance from scraps at the margins of empire. Using Hagar’s wilderness as a framework, I contend womanist modes of meal-making as models for ethical approaches to production and consumption. As the demand for ecologically-sound efforts like urban farming rises, I consider how the interplay of public policy, communal practice, and radical theologies inform resistance strategies amid broader networks of political and economic power. Approaching the work as a theologian and as a locally elected official involved in praxis, I employ theory and praxis to consider how one’s identity in food and faith inform kitchen table politics.