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November 24, 2025, Adrian, Michigan – With great sadness, the Adrian Dominican Sisters announce the death of Sister Jamie T. Phelps, OP, PhD, a theologian, preacher, social worker, social and racial justice advocate, and passionate promoter of Black Catholic Studies and the gifts of Black Catholics to the Church. She died at the Dominican Life Center in Adrian, Michigan, on November 22, 2025.
 
In her early years of ministry, Sister Jamie served as an elementary school teacher and then psychiatric social worker. Her passion for racial and social justice and love of the gifts of Black Catholics to the Church led to years of engagement in advocacy for racial equality, theological studies, and the formation of Black Catholic leaders. She was a founding member of the National Black Sisters’ Conference and one of the founders of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies (IBCS) of Xavier University of Louisiana. Sister Jamie served as a consultor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) as they wrote their pastoral letter on racism and was a longtime active member of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA).
 
“The significance of Sister Jamie Phelps’ pioneering scholarship and strategic administrative ability cannot be overstated. She has made a substantive, radical, and creative difference in how we Black Catholics think of ourselves, think of God, think of Church, and think of Black theology,” said Dr. M. Shawn Copeland, Professor emerita, of Boston College’s Theology Department, who collaborated with Sister Jamie at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies and in the Black Catholic Theological Symposium (BCTS) for more than 45 years. Copeland continued: “Sister Jamie’s theological work is intellectually imaginative, demanding, passionate, and uncompromising; moreover, it is grounded in rigorous historical research, balanced in exposition and analysis, nuanced in judgment. She will remain a major force in the thematization of Black Catholic Theology.”
 
“Sister Jamie is one of our giants – a mother, a teacher, a scholar, and a faithful daughter of the Black Catholic Church,” Father Kareem R. Smith, President of the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus (NBCCC), wrote when offering prayers for Sister Jamie. “Through her witness, her voice, and her decades of service, she has helped shape our theological imagination and has strengthened our commitment to serve our people with courage and love. Many of us stand on her shoulders.” Father Kareem was taught by Sister Jamie at IBCS while a seminarian.
 
“The Adrian Dominican Sisters have been deeply blessed by Sister Jamie’s joyful, challenging, and transformative presence among us, calling us to fully live Gospel imperatives in our Dominican sisterhood,” said Congregation Prioress Elise D. García, OP. “She was a Dominican preacher through and through who played an indelible national leadership role in raising up Black Catholic Studies as an essential field of study for all Catholics. Her love and passion for the common good of all God’s people are an enduring legacy – calling us all to keep carrying on.”
 
In a December 2016 interview with The National Catholic Reporter’s Global Sisters Report, Sister Jamie offered her own perspective on her life’s work. “As a Black Catholic Dominican and theologian, I have been gifted with a specific worldview that allows me to interpret the Gospel in a way that speaks to diverse cultures and racial-ethnic groups so that the meaning of the Gospel for their lives, their city and the world becomes evident,” she said. “My social identity as a doubly marginalized person in society gifts me with the perspective of oppressed and poor people.”
 
Sister Jamie was born on October 24, 1941, in Mobile, Alabama, to Alfred and Emma (Brown) Phelps. The family migrated to Chicago, where Sister Jamie was taught by Adrian Dominican Sisters in elementary school and graduated from the Josephinum Academy in 1959.
 
She entered the Adrian Dominican Congregation on September 8, 1959, and was received as a novice on August 4, 1960, taking the religious name of Sister Martin Thomas. She professed first vows on August 5, 1961, and final vows on August 5, 1966, becoming the first Black Sister in the Congregation.
 
Embracing the Dominican tradition of study, Sister Jamie earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Siena Heights College (University) in Adrian in 1969, a master’s degree in social work with a focus on group sequence, from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 1972, a master’s in theology from St. John University in Minnesota in 1974, and a doctorate in systematic theology from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., in 1989.
 
In the first 10 years of her ministry, Sister Jamie taught at four elementary schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago. On obtaining her degree in social work, she ministered as an Illinois State-certified psychiatric social worker, first at Mercy Hospital and then at Chicago Child Care Society in Chicago.

After earning the PhD in theology, Sister Jamie taught at the Catholic Theological Union (CTU) in Chicago from 1986 to 1998. During her tenure there, she founded and directed CTU’s Augustus Tolton Pastoral Ministry Program, which prepares lay people for ministry to Black Catholics. From 1998 to 2003, she held a visiting, then tenured professorship in Theology at Loyola University, Chicago. During the Spring Term of 2002-2003 academic year, she served as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theology at the University of Dayton.
 
While pursuing her doctoral degree, Sister Jamie participated in the first meeting in 1978 of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium, and little over a decade later, in 1991, played a decisive role in restructuring the BCTS as a national learned interdisciplinary professional society for Black Catholic scholars holding doctoral degrees in theology and related fields. The BCTS encourages the teaching, discussion, and analysis of Black Catholic religious and cultural experience in Church and society and supports the development and publication of Black Catholic theology. Sister Jamie served as Convener of the Symposium from 1992 to 2001.
 
Sister Jamie has been associated with the Institute for Black Catholic Studies since its inception in 1980, serving as a major consultant to the late Reverend Dr. Thaddeus Posey, O.F.M., Cap., who was the founding Director of the Institute. The Institute for Black Catholic Studies is a degree program in pastoral studies offered during summer sessions at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Since 1989, Sister Jamie served as a member of the Master of Theology degree faculty; from 1994 to 2000, she also was the Associate Director for the Institute’s graduate degree program; and from 2003 to 2011, she served as the Director of the Institute and Katherine Drexel Professor of Systematic Theology at Xavier University.
 
“The purpose [of the IBCS] was to provide education for Blacks and non-Blacks to do effective ministry in the Black Catholic community,” Sister Jamie explained in an August 2023 interview. To do this, she said, “you need to know the history and culture of that community and the social and cultural circumstances. … The fact that the Institute is still living suggests to me that this is something that God wanted to happen to guarantee an improved ministry in the Black Catholic community.” In 2022, the Adrian Dominican Sisters endowed a fund for student scholarships at the IBCS as an act of reparation for and acknowledgment of the Congregation’s past complicity in the nation’s history of racial injustice. It is named the Sister Jamie T. Phelps, OP, PhD Scholarship Fund.
 
After leaving Xavier University in 2011, Sister Jamie continued her ministry as a theologian, writer, and preacher. She was a Visiting Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame during the 2012-2013 academic year. During her retirement in Chicago, Sister Jamie continued her work in theological research, writing, and consulting. She has written and lectured extensively on African American Catholics, the nature and mission of the Church, religion, human rights, evangelization, and Christology. She is the editor of Black and Catholic – The Challenges and Gifts of Black Folk: Contributions of African American Experience and Thought to Catholic Theology and co-editor with Cyprian Davis, OSB, of Stamped with the Image of God: African Americans as God’s Image in Black. Sister Jamie continued her preaching and teaching roles when she moved into the Dominican Life Center at the Adrian Dominican Sisters Motherhouse Campus in 2019 and was active in the life of the Motherhouse community.
 
Sister Jamie has been nationally recognized with various honors, including:

 • The Harriet Tubman Award, given in 1999 by the National Black Sisters’ Conference, honoring a member who “through her ministry is an advocate for Black people.”
 
• The Ann O’Hara Graf Memorial Award, given by the Women’s Consultation in Constructive Theology of the Catholic Theological Society of America, honoring a woman whose accomplishments include liberating action on behalf of women in the Church and/or broader community, in 2010.
 
• The “How Beautiful Are Their Feet” Award, given in 2016 at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a national network of progressive African American faith leaders and their congregations.
 
• An honorary doctorate in 2016 from Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, a graduate school in the Dominican tradition.
 
• Recognition as “Mother of the Institute for Black Catholic Studies” at the IBCS commencement in August 2023.
 
• Honored in March 2025 during the Catholic Theological Union’s Harambee celebration, which supports the Augustus Tolton Pastoral Ministry Program.

Sister Jamie will be remembered during a visitation from 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. on December 2 in the gathering space of St. Catherine Chapel, followed by a Vigil Service at 7:00 p.m. in St. Catherine Chapel. A funeral Mass will be offered in St. Catherine Chapel at 10:30 a.m. on December 3. Prayers of Committal will follow in the Congregation Cemetery. Those who cannot attend in person may watch the Vigil Service and Funeral Mass via livestream at https://adriandominicans.org/Live-Stream.

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 The Dominican Sisters of Adrian, a Congregation of about 350 vowed women religious and 180 Associates, traces its roots back to St. Dominic in the 13th century. The Sisters minister in 15 states, the Dominican Republic, Norway, and the Philippines. The Congregation’s Vision is to “seek truth, make peace, reverence life.”