A Letter to the Reader

Welcome!

I’m so glad you’re here and have decided to join Reconsidering Eve: The Experience. This journey is one of spirit—born from a commitment to liberate the hearts and minds of Black women from the internalized messages about who we are.

For me, many of those messages began with what we were taught about Eve, the mother of all living, in the book of Genesis. If you’re like me, you grew up hearing sermons about how Eve ushered sin into the world through her disobedience—a disobedience said to be driven by her desire to be like God and to know good from evil. Coupled with other passages in the Bible that reflected troubling views of women, I quickly came to see women as either victims or villains in God’s cosmic plan.

This deeply shaped the way I related to the Divine. I saw God as neurotic and temperamental, ready to punish me at the slightest provocation. It also shaped how I related to myself—seeing myself through a lens of imperfection, evil, and excess. I lived with, and am still healing from, that distorted view. Recovery has required honest conversations about how what I had been taught fed into this negative self-image.

Those conversations—about who I am and how I connect with Eve and other women in Scripture—eventually gave birth to Reconsidering Eve: Towards a Deepened Consciousness in 2024. As I sat with the text, I realized something was amiss. I was not the sinner I had been told I was—none of us were. Not because we are perfect, but because the notion of our inherent unworthiness was built on lies meant to justify the oppression of Black women, who, since the period of enslavement, have been cast as mammies (asexual), jezebels (oversexed), or sapphires (angry and aggressive).

Writing and publishing that book was my invitation for readers to study alongside me, to arrive at their own conclusions, and to decide how they wanted to relate to the text. Though it may read as a critique, it is truly an invitation to deepen your own knowing and spirituality.

As I shared the book, I realized readers like you needed something more to support this inner work. Reconsidering Eve is not only a call to read but to examine one’s own relationship with the Divine. I wanted to design a process that would help you explore faith with tenderness—a process that honors the ways faith has kept us grounded while also encouraging openness and vulnerability.

What follows is the process: six sessions that guide you through the book and offer space to write and reflect. Each session includes a chapter from Reconsidering Eve, a set of reflection questions, activities for further engagement, and space for you to write. You’ll also find preparatory activities to help you engage the material in different ways, including a gentle invitation to create sacred space before you begin.

Move at the pace that feels right for you—whether that’s six weeks or six months. Both are welcome.