Continuities and Departures: Women’s Religious and Spiritual Leaderhip (original) (raw)
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Continuities and departures: women's religious and spiritual leadership
Journal For the Study of Religion, 2013
This special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion is dedicated to exploring the continuities and departures of women's theorising, theologising, and philosophising with respect to women's religious and spiritual leadership. Accordingly, the papers included in this special issue are reflective of some of the poignant critiques raised by controversial foremotherswhich continue, to various extents, to inform ongoing debates on women's religious and spiritual leadership. The most obvious enduring critique is that of patriarchy's refusal to recognise women as equal religious subjects. Simultaneously, the contributions are also reflective of the situated and localised knowledge that arises from personal and collective trajectories, multi-layered feminist standpoints, and commitments to continue to challenge methodological, theological, and theoretical perspectives, feminist or otherwise. Hence, the diverse contributions in this special issue render visible some of the similarities and convergences that continue to mould the critical field of scholarship and activism in the area of women's full participation in religious discourses, while also foregrounding the distinct, diverging, and innovative voices that invite us to imagine new possibilities of women's theorising, theologising, and philosophising. Women scholars in religious studies have produced notable and inspiring accounts of women's religious and spiritual leadership across a range of historical and new religious traditions and movements (
Charismatic women have played significant roles as religious leaders in America. The spiritual experiences and visions of Ann Lee (d. 1784) and her ecstatic modes of worship attracted a following, ultimately resulting in the ordered Shaker communities of celibate men and women that flourished in the early nineteenth century. Later in the nineteenth century, American women became famous as trance speakers and mediums after the Fox sisters' claims of communication with the dead sparked interest in Spiritualism. Mary Baker Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, based on her healing experience entailing her immediate perception of the truth contained in the gospels. The mysterious Russian noblewoman, Madame Helena Blavatsky, claimed to receive teachings directly from hidden Masters of the Wisdom, and these teachings became the primary scriptures of the Theosophical movement. In contemporary America, white Pentecostal women cite God's calling to justify their itinerant preaching or pastoral ministry. Due to their direct contact with the Holy Spirit and with their spiritual fore mothers, African American women in New Orleans are ordained as ministers, bishops, and archbishops in the Spiritual churches there. The extraordinary nature of the leadership of all these women suggests that there is a need for women's religious leadership to be sanctioned by charisma, the direct experience of the sacred. But is it possible for women to go beyond charismatic legitimation of religious authority, and if so, how will that take place?
Feminist approaches to the study of religion.
This article is a genealogy of feminism and feminist approaches to the study of religion. It is genealogical in the sense that I wish to speak to the development of feminist theorizing and its engagement in the work of feminists in the study of religion. To do this I first provide a processual narrative or locating the “events” of feminism (proposing series rather than unity) in the conditions of possibility that allowed for the acceptance of feminist “waves” one through three, as they are often times referred. The conditions of possibility are, as Michel Foucault wrote, “particular stages of [social] forces” (1984, 83) that support, either positively or negatively the discourse(s). In my development of a genealogy of feminism, I consider some successes, but also important prohibitions in feminist discourses, and their manifestation in the feminist narratives generated in the study of religion. These prohibitions, or places where feminist voices sometimes cease, are important to make apparent if only to remind ourselves feminists too have not arrived at the end of history.
From Exception to Norm? Women in Theology
Priscilla Papers, 2024
Author: Ann Loades Publisher: CBE International This essay arose from my contribution to the lecture series which commemorates the remarkable achievements of the Smith sisters, known in the course of time as Dr. Margaret Gibson and Dr. Agnes Lewis. My tactics in this essay are to offer a look, both retrospective and prospective, via a narrative with comments which may, I hope, stimulate some discussion. I am hoping that women in this day and age may continue to contribute to theology and religious studies, as they have for some considerable time both without and within an institutional base of some kind. In other words, in engaging with the past I am looking and hoping for stimulus for the present and the future. It is recognised, however, that there will be problems to face in engaging with theology and religious studies, since some of these relate to issues intrinsic to Christian tradition in much need of reform. Since this particular lecture series is the gift of the University of St Andrews, I relate my essay to connections there so far as possible.
Women of Faith and the Quest for Spiritual Authenticity
Drawn from over fifty-eight individual, in-depth, qualitative interviews with women of faith in Malaysia and Britain, Women of Faith and the Quest for Spiritual Authenticity is a multifaith, multicultural and cross-cultural comparative focus that explores women's religious expressions, as derived from practising Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Wiccans and Druids among others. Despite social advances towards women's emancipation and the lacerating critiques from feminist theologians across the Abrahamic religions and beyond, women's religious experiences remain submerged beneath the weight of patriarchal religious leadership and ongoing masculinised, dogmatic interpretations. Even feminism itself has yet to move the spiritual onto their main agenda of inequity in women's lives. This extensive, feminist research monograph challenges these exclusions to centre and amplify women's voices in speaking powerfully of their religious experiences, interpretations and practices. This is an ecumenical and entertaining ethnography where women's narratives and life stories ground faith as embodied, personal, painful, vibrant, diverse, illuminating and shared. This book will be of interest not only to academics and students of the sociology of religion, feminist and gender studies, politics, ethnicity and Southeast Asian studies, but is equally accessible to the general reader with a broad interest in faith and feminism.
Spiritualising the Sacred: A Critique of Feminist Theology
Modern Theology, 1997
Though this paper is critical of feminist theology, it is not written out of any long-standing or deep-seated antagonism towards the feminist theological enterprise. Indeed, far from growing out of hostility, it grows out of much more positive feelings, out of the high hopes and expectations of feminist theology which I once held. For when I first became aware of feminist theology in the early 1980s it seemed to me, as to many of my fellow students of theology, like water in the desert. It was enormously refreshing to hear women's voices in theology, voices willing to identify themselves as women and to claim their right to do theology. For almost two thousand years, the study and writing of theology had been an almost exclusively male preserve, and the self-conscious and unapologetic emergence of women into this world was truly a momentous thing. So I felt-and I still feel-a debt of gratitude to those pioneering feminist theologians whose courage made me feel a little more courageous and whose presence made me feel a little less like an intruder into a world which was not my own. Despite this continuing gratitude, my positive feelings about feminist theology have over the years changed to disappointment and frustration. The burden of my complaint is that feminist theology has failed to be sufficiently theological. I believe that this is the result of a failure to engage in any serious and sustained way with the realities of Christian faith and tradition. This failure mars both the critical and the constructive projects of feminist theology: the former is marked by a tendency to ignore the more complex realities of the Christian faith, past and present, and by a preference for a rather simplistic modern construal of Christianity, whilst the latter Modern Theology 13:
CALL FOR PAPERS ICSAH 2023 -WOMEN IN RELIGION
5th International Conference on Arts and Humanities, 8th-9th May 2023, Milano, Italy. Topic: Women in Religion: from spiritual leadership to female empowerment. Deadline for abstracts 30 March 2023.
Gender and Religion: The Changing Status of Women Within Religious Context
In the early days, positions and duties of women were limited to domestic affairs, child bearing and rearing, taking care of the family and surprisingly, women were not allowed to wear the same clothing, in quality, as men. The story is the same in religious set up, but in recent time, the roles and statuses of women have changed, even in the leadership roles within the religious institution. This paper is basically about the changing roles, responsibilities and dignity of women within the context of Christian religion. The paper discusses how it was, how it is now and why the changes. It also examines roles, statuses and dignity of women since the inception of Christianity and the leadership roles of women within religion.