Green lap, brown embrace, blue body: the ecospirituality of Alice Walker - Afro-American author

22. John O'Brien, "Alice Walker: An Interview," in Gates and Appiah, 328.

23. Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 3.

24. Sam Keen, The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 26.

25. Ziegenhals, 1036.

26. Alice Walker, Living by the Word (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 144. Cited hereafter in the text as LBW.

27. Alice Walker, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1983). Cited hereafter in the text as HML.

28. Cf. "How Did I Get Away with Killing One of the Biggest Lawyers in the State? It Was Easy," in YCK, 21-26.

29. Cf. Walker's remarks to Earth (addressed as God) concerning healthful "conspiracy" in AWL, 52-53.

30. Cf. "The Diary of an African Nun," ILT, 113-18.

31. Trudy Bloser Bush, "Transforming Vision: Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston," Christian Century 105 (1988): 1039.

32. O'Brien, in Gates and Appiah, 341. Cf. 332 for comments on African animism and its persistence among African Americans.

33. This prayer is one of several which appear: "Thank you again. I love you. I love your trees, your sun, your stars and moon and light. Your darkness. Your plums and watermelons and meadows. And all your creatures and their fur and eyes and feathers and scales" (LBW, 96).

34. The quotation from this interview with Winfrey appears in Winchell, 133. We may recall that Winfrey portrayed Sophia in the film The Color Purple.

35. Henry C. Simmons, "Reflections on The Color Purple: Losing and Finding God in Non-Male Images," Living Light 25 (1989): 354, 356, 358.

36. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 326-27.

37. Abrams, 34.

38. Abrams, 330.

39. Cf. Abrams, for a discussion of Sir Philip Sidney's presentation of this approach, 14-15.

40. Cf. Abrams, for a discussion of Samuel Johnson's critique of Shakespeare on the grounds of didactic negligence, 329.

41. See the epigraph from William Butler Yeats which lends The Mirror and the Lamp its title.

42. bell hooks, "Reading and Resistance: The Color Purple," in Gates and Appiah, 291.

43. Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).

44. Cf. Hans Kung and Karl-Josef Kuschel, A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World's Religions (New York: Continuum, 1993) for the full text and the list of signatories.

PAMELA A. SMITH is Director of Lay Ministry Programs for SS. Cyril and Methodius Seminary and author of What Are They Saying about Environmental Ethics? (Paulist, 1977).

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