Bøger i Studies in Women and Religion serien

"Every time we raise our voices, we hear echoes." Jo-Anne Elder, from the Foreword Through short stories, journal entries and poetry, the women in Voices and Echoes explore the changing landscape of their spiritual lives. Experienced writers such as Lorna Crozier, Di Brandt and Ann Copeland, as well as strong new voices, appear to speak to each other as they draw from a wealth of personal resources to find a way to face life's questions and discover meaning in their lives. There is something familiar about these stories and poems - they echo those we've heard before and those we've half forgotten. Whether they search for a voice in a world where men monopolize or journey into painful memories to free the self from the past, they do not despair, they do not end. Individual entries become the whole story - an unending story of rebirth and reaffirmation. The book begins with an illuminating foreword that introduces readers to the cultural and philosophical background of many of the stories, and concludes with the reflections of scholars, writers and artists that are intended to provoke further discussion.

Why did it take so long for the United Church of Canada to respond to violence against women? Tracy Trothen looks at the United Church as a uniquely Canadian institution, and explores how it has approached gender and sexuality issues. She argues that how the Church deals with these issues influences its ability to name violence against women.

This book explores the intersection in contemporary Western culture of Catholic sexual theology and adolescent female developmental and sexual experiences. The voices of adolescent females, so long silent in sexual theologies, are given privilege here in the articulation of a normative theology. Applying a feminist natural law framework, the book engages both theoretical scholarship and practical evidence from psychological and other social sciences to inform sexual theology in the Catholic tradition. Attending to gendered, developmental, and social contexts, Doris Kieser explores adolescent females' experiences of puberty, menarche, various sexual activities, communities of support, sexual desire, and the pleasure and danger these realities reap. She critically explores historical and traditional sexual theologies and prevailing social patriarchal and androcentric sexual attitudes through a feminist lens. The author's attention to the voices of girls and women, and her aim to see their sexual flourishing in particular and diverse social contexts, yields a theology mindful of the rich complexities of female sexual desire, pleasure, and well-being. The result is an integrated sexual theology that grapples with the Catholic theological tradition, feminist theory and theology, and the embodied experiences of females. For anyone who is invested in the lives and well-being of adolescent females, this work uncovers both barriers and boons to their sexual flourishing.

This collection of essays explores how women from a variety of religious and cultural communities have contributed to the richly textured, pluralistic society of Canada. Focusing on women's religiosity, it examines the ways in which they have carried and conserved, and brought forward and transformed their cultures-old and new-in modern Canada.

Impelled by a call to share their gifts through service, Russian Mennonite women immigrating to Canada organized their own church societies (Vereine) as avenues of mission and spiritual strengthening. For women who were restricted from leadership positions within the church, these societies became the primary avenue of church involvement. Through them they contributed vast amounts of energy, time and financial resources to the mission activity of the church. The societies thus became a context in which women could speak, pray and creatively give expression to their own understanding of the biblical message. Using primary sources such as reports, letters, minutes, etc., as well as society histories, interviews and survey data, Redekop charts the development of these societies, from the establishment of the earliest ones in the 1870s to their flowering in the fifties and sixties and their decline in the eighties and nineties. The Work of Their Hands elucidates the context in which Mennonite women lived their identity as Christian women, one considered appropriate by themselves and the institutional church. It also shows how changes to the societies, including declining membership and a shift in their primary focus from sewing and baking to one of spiritual fellowship, reflect the changing roles of women within the church, the home and the wider society. The Work of Their Hands is an important book in the history of Mennonite women's spirituality and will be a valuable resource for religious studies, women's studies and Canadian history.

How do our social, political and religious commitments influence our interpretation of biblical texts? Are obedience and suspicion necessarily opposite ways to respond to the authority of the Bible? Can one criticize and be transformed at the same time? Lydia Neufeld Harder explores these questions from the vantage point of a scholar, a feminist and a member of a faith community. A hermeneutics of obedience, rising out of the Mennonite theological tradition, and a hermeneutics of suspicion, advocated by many feminist theologians, seem to represent opposite approaches to the Bible's authority. The resulting polarization could easily have led to static definitions of authority and the subtle domination of those who differ from the majority. However, by focusing on the common theological concept of discipleship, Harder has constructed a critical dialogue, beginning a process of creative change in her own view of authority. This new view opens the way for an interpretation of the Gospel of Mark. A new appreciation of both the power and the vulnerability of the biblical text leads to a view of authority that embraces both suspicion and obedience in a dynamic interpretative process.

Canadian Methodist women, like women of all religious traditions, have expressed their faith in accordance with their denominational heritage. Canadian Methodist Women, 1766-1925: Marys, Marthas, Mothers in Israel analyzes the spiritual life and the varied activities of women whose faith helped shape the life of the Methodist Church and of Canadian society from the latter half of the eighteenth century until church union in 1925. Based on extensive readings of periodicals, biographies, autobiographies, and the records of many women's groups across Canada, as well as early histories of Methodism, Marilyn Fÿrdig Whiteley tells the story of ordinary women who provided hospitality for itinerant preachers, taught Sunday school, played the melodeon, selected and supported women missionaries, and taught sewing to immigrant girls, thus expressing their faith according to their opportunities. In performing these tasks they sometimes expanded women's roles well beyond their initial boundaries. Focusing on religious practices, Canadian Methodist Women, 1766-1925 provides a broad perspective on the Methodist movement that helped shape nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Canadian society. The use and interpretation of many new or little-used sources will interest those wishing to learn more about the history of women in religion and in Canadian society.