To What Do You Give Breath? An Interfaith Exploration into the Feminine Voice of Prophetic Leadership

Abstract

The FeminineVOICE is effeminate in nature because it reflects the softer attributes of Shekinah, the Holy Spirit, embracing her strength, stamina and guidance in compassion, love and mercy.  While it may be as highly manifested in the context of multiple-jeopardy as oil pressed from ripe olives, this Voice has no physical gender or race.  It is the Voice for God; and, it can, has, and will be pressed from the fruit of others.

A women’s experience, however, points most steadily to this phenomenon of prophetic voice in the relationship between agency and mutual transformation, in which women are forged into transformative leadership.  The conditions of those who are influenced by this voice are changed as intimacy embraces mission.  The prophetic voice bridges God’s will to the ekklasia in the divine promises of scripture concerning an evolving human condition of social justice in perfect love...as that which is to come.

Currently, the growth of women in leadership is a well-noted and welcomed fact in organizational life; but, there is a lack of understanding about the ways spiritually motivated women in leadership drive issues of social justice to a moral center.  This calls for greater disclosure concerning the feminine voice of prophetic leadership.

This study explores the nature of this prophetic voice through the narratives of spiritually driven women in leadership who are involved in social transformation.  The central claim is that the feminine prophetic voice for social justice advocates a moral agency grounded in an ethic of care that transcends religious preference among the daughters of Abraham.

This project falls into the realm of the qualitative, a type of research that employs specific techniques for understanding people in their natural context.  In the book Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1977) argues that newly formed technologies of surveillance, like the modern interview, do not just accommodate and incorporate the experience of individual subjects, but enters into the construction of individual subjects in their own right.

The qualitative interview will best expose the ways these women construct an ethic of care that drives social concerns to a moral center; and, allow us to determine whether religious preferences influence the construction of these individual subjects as they are, in fact, expressed in their own right.

This is the methodical purpose for which we strive, to enter the world of prophetic leadership so to comprehend the subjectivity of women’s experience and the cultural context in which they lead, so then to better understand the ethic of care and spiritual motivation embodied in these voices.

This type of research may as well have deeper implications pertaining to the role of the feminine prophetic voice in the creation of a new world view because this voice is so powerful in its accomplishment of social transformation.

The greater implications for this work, in my view, rest with the potential of the prophetic voice to induce deep change toward the transformation of humankind: a human paradigm shift inspired by the creation of a new world view.  I believe that what makes any voice truly prophetic is its passion for the possibility of restoring the human spirit to the image of God.

Welcome to the FeminineVOICE of Prophetic Leadership!

Rev. Avril L’Mour Weathers, PhD