Carter Heyward

Isabel Carter Heyward (born 1945 in North Carolina) is a lesbian feminist theologian, teacher and priest in the Episcopal Church – the province of the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States. In 1974, she was one of the Philadelphia Eleven, eleven women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976. 2Academic career Heyward holds the degree of Bachelor of Arts from Randolph-Macon Woman's College (now Randolph College) in Virginia, the degree of Master of Arts in the Comparative Study of Religion from Columbia University, and that of Master of Divinity in Religion and Psychiatry from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. She was awarded a PhD in 1980 for her work on redemption in the thought of two early Christian thinkers. She taught at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1975, and was Howard Chandler Robbins Professor of Theology there until she retired in 2006. The inaugural Carter Heyward Scholars Lecture was given at the college in her honour in October 2006. She received the Distinguished Alumni/ae Award from Union Theological Seminary in 1998. 2Theology – the Nature of God Author of a number of books and numerous articles, Carter Heyward's most distinctive theological idea is that it is open to each of us to incarnate God (that is, to embody God's power), and that we do so most fully when we seek to relate genuinely to others in what she calls relationality. When we do this, we are said to be 'godding', a verb Heyward herself coined. God is defined in her work as 'our power in mutual relation