Emilie Townes

Media Appearances

• We Talked to People of Faith About Being Both Religious and Pro-Choice

  “I've listened to all of the arguments about when life happens, and I think of something my mother, who was a scientist, once told me. She said, ‘As scientists, we can run the experiments. We can give you explanations for how things happen on a cellular level. We can do all these things, but at a certain point it becomes a mystery, and in that mystery is God.’ And I think she's right on target with that: This is something that God handles, and what any one person would do in this situation shouldn't infringe upon someone else's right to make a different decision. It is a choice that calls for deep discernment. I do know that we need to be a lot more responsible once life gets here. We focus so much on the unborn that we fail to see that we have a miserable safety net in this country when it comes to helping women and children have healthy lives with adequate health care. We should ultimately be caring for folks wherever they are.”

  July 16th, 2019

• Vanderbilt names university chaplain

  Dr. Emilie Townes, who serves as dean of the Vanderbilt Divinity School and as E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society, said “the Divinity School look forward to continuing its “strong working relationship with the Office of Religious Life under Christopher’s leadership.”

  April 3rd, 2019

• Academics, Experts Share Diversity Dreams for 2019

  Dr. Emilie M. Townes, professor of American studies and womanist ethics and society at Vanderbilt Divinity School, said she wants to see ” the upper administration in colleges and universities begin to reflect the diversity, access and inclusion being encouraged in the student and faculty populations of those universities.”

  January 2nd, 2019

• Black Lives Matter co-founder to speak at Vanderbilt University event

  “This symposium represents the spirit of collaboration and the importance that we, as a university, place on open and mutual conversations about the important issues of our day,” said Emilie Townes, dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society. “The importance of our addressing racial justice as a university and as a nation is as important today as it has ever been in the life of this country.”

  September 11th, 2018

• Katie Cannon, 68, Dies; Lifted Black Women’s Perspective in Theology

  “What Cannon launched insists that God’s creation is much larger and more diverse when we listen to and learn from the moral wisdom found in the everyday lives of Black women,” the Rev. Dr. Emilie M. Townes, dean of the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, wrote in an email. “Her insistence that we listen and learn also helped give other groups who had been left out of scholarship or ministry a way to claim their space under the sun.”

  August 14th, 2018

• Six Black Women at the Center of Gravity in Theological Education

  And they follow in the footsteps of other firsts, like Dr. Emilie M. Townes who was named dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School in 2012. She was one of the first African-American female deans of a theological institution, according to reports, and only the second woman at Vanderbilt.

  July 10th, 2017

• The Future of Religion Is Ascendant

  Far from a dying thing, religion is flourishing and will continue to do so. This is a trend driven not so much by ideology (whether conservative, progressive or in between) or by issues of the day that generate religious debate (prayer in schools, for example, or same-gender marriage). Rather, it springs from the simple fact that the world’s population keeps growing, and by most predictions will continue to do so for the foreseeable future—barring disease, famine, political upheaval, war or other factors we cannot predict.

  April 26th, 2015