Theory of Women in Religions
Theory of Women in Religions

Author: Catherine Wessinger

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1479809462

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An introduction to the study of women in diverse religious cultures While women have made gains in equality over the past two centuries, equality for women in many religious traditions remains contested throughout the world. In the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints women are not ordained as priests. In areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan under Taliban occupation girls and women students and their teachers risk their lives to go to school. And in Sri Lanka, fully ordained Buddhist nuns are denied the government identity cards that recognize them as citizens. Is it possible to create families, societies, and religions in which women and men are equal? And if so, what are the factors that promote equality? Theory of Women in Religions offers an economic model to shed light on the forces that have impacted the respective statuses of women and men from the earliest developmental stages of society through the present day. Catherine Wessinger integrates data and theories from anthropology, archaeology, sociology, history, gender studies, and psychology into a concise history of religions introduction to the complex relationships between gender and religion. She argues that socio-economic factors that support specific gender roles, in conjunction with religious norms and ideals, have created a gendered division of labor that both directly and indirectly reinforces gender inequality. Yet she also highlights how as the socio-economic situation is changing religion is being utilized to support the transition toward women’s equality, noting the ways in which many religious representations of gender change over time.

Women within Religions
Women within Religions

Author: Loreen Maseno

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2019-12-05

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1532697570

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Women are the majority in almost every cultural or social group. However, their roles vary in various cultures, religions, and traditions. In some cultures and religions, they are highly honored, while in others they are neglected, oppressed, and segregated. This book examines women’s role in a few selected world religions, namely Christianity, Islam, African Traditional Religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. It also surveys the concept of patriarchy and the various theoretical perspectives surrounding it. Eventually, this book discusses the concept of ecofeminism and how feminists perceive of the relationship between nature and the oppression of women. The book grapples with the question, “In what way do world religions perceive of women and their role in their teachings and traditions?” This book is important for students and teachers of gender studies, African theology, and Christian theology as a whole.

Women in New Religions
Women in New Religions

Author: Laura Vance

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-03-13

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1479847992

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An in-depth history of selected New Religions that highlights the roles of women in their founding and continual practice Women in New Religions offers an engaging look at women’s evolving place in the birth and development of new religious movements. It focuses on four disparate new religions—Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, The Family International, and Wicca—to illuminate their implications for gender socialization, religious leadership and participation, sexuality, and family ideals. Religious worldviews and gender roles interact with one another in complicated ways. This is especially true within new religions, which frequently set roles for women in ways that help the movements to define their boundaries in relation to the wider society. As new religious movements emerge, they often position themselves in opposition to dominant society and concomitantly assert alternative roles for women. But these religions are not monolithic: rather than defining gender in rigid and repressive terms, new religions sometimes offer possibilities to women that are not otherwise available. Vance traces expectations for women as the religions emerge, and transformation of possibilities and responsibilities for women as they mature. Weaving theory with examination of each movement’s origins, history, and beliefs and practices, this text contextualizes and situates ideals for women in new religions. The book offers an accessible analysis of the complex factors that influence gender ideology and its evolution in new religious movements, including the movements’ origins, charismatic leadership and routinization, theology and doctrine, and socio-historical contexts. It shows how religions shape definitions of women’s place in a way that is informed by response to social context, group boundaries, and identity.

Women in World Religions
Women in World Religions

Author: Arvind Sharma

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1987-04-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1438419686

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This is a book by women about women in the religions of the world. It presents all the basic facts and ideological issues concerning the position of women in the major religious traditions of humanity: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, and tribal religions. A special feature of the book is its phenomenological approach, wherein scholars examine sacred textual materials. Each contributor not only studies her religion from within, but also studies it from her own feminine perspective. Each is an adept historian of religions, who grounds her analysis in publicly verifiable facts. The book strikes a delicate balance between hard fact and delicate perception, the best tradition of phenomenology and the history of religions. It also demonstrates how much religions may vary over time. Contributors are Katherine K. Young, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McGill University; Nancy Schuster Barnes, whose Ph.D. is in Sanskrit and Indian Studies; M. Theresa Kelleher, Assistant Professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Manhattanville College; Barbara Reed, Assistant Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College; Denise L. Carmody, Professor and Chair, Department of Religion, The University of Tulsa. Also Jane I. Smith, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary; Rita M. Gross, Associate Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Clair.

Women in Japanese Religions
Women in Japanese Religions

Author: Barbara Ambros

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2015-05-29

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1479827622

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A comprehensive history of women in Japanese religious traditions Scholars have widely acknowledged the persistent ambivalence with which the Japanese religious traditions treat women. Much existing scholarship depicts Japan’s religious traditions as mere means of oppression. But this view raises a question: How have ambivalent and even misogynistic religious discourses on gender still come to inspire devotion and emulation among women? In Women in Japanese Religions, Barbara R. Ambros examines the roles that women have played in the religions of Japan. An important corrective to more common male-centered narratives of Japanese religious history, this text presents a synthetic long view of Japanese religions from a distinct angle that has typically been discounted in standard survey accounts of Japanese religions. Drawing on a diverse collection of writings by and about women, Ambros argues that ambivalent religious discourses in Japan have not simply subordinated women but also given them religious resources to pursue their own interests and agendas. Comprising nine chapters organized chronologically, the book begins with the archeological evidence of fertility cults and the early shamanic ruler Himiko in prehistoric Japan and ends with an examination of the influence of feminism and demographic changes on religious practices during the “lost decades” of the post-1990 era. By viewing Japanese religious history through the eyes of women, Women in Japanese Religions presents a new narrative that offers strikingly different vistas of Japan’s pluralistic traditions than the received accounts that foreground male religious figures and male-dominated institutions.

Women and World Religions
Women and World Religions

Author: Lucinda J. Peach

Publisher: Pearson

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13:

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This book features a number of different articles and essays that focus on women as active agents of their spiritual lives--a topic that is often overlooked in most other world religion books. It explores how women from many parts of the world have thought about, acted, and have been treated as members of a religious tradition. Investigates how women of a variety of religious traditions (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc.) practice their religion, how their beliefs differ from men, and how they have carved out their own place within their religious tradition. For anyone interested in how women are shaped by and how they shape the various world religions.

Women and Religion in the African Diaspora
Women and Religion in the African Diaspora

Author: R. Marie Griffith

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2006-09-22

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 9780801883699

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This landmark collection of newly commissioned essays explores how diverse women of African descent have practiced religion as part of the work of their ordinary and sometimes extraordinary lives. By examining women from North America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa, the contributors identify the patterns that emerge as women, religion, and diaspora intersect, mapping fresh approaches to this emergent field of inquiry. The volume focuses on issues of history, tradition, and the authenticity of African-derived spiritual practices in a variety of contexts, including those where memories of suffering remain fresh and powerful. The contributors discuss matters of power and leadership and of religious expressions outside of institutional settings. The essays study women of Christian denominations, African and Afro-Caribbean traditions, and Islam, addressing their roles as spiritual leaders, artists and musicians, preachers, and participants in bible-study groups. This volume's transnational mixture, along with its use of creative analytical approaches, challenges existing paradigms and summons new models for studying women, religions, and diasporic shiftings across time and space.

Women in New Religions
Women in New Religions

Author: Elizabeth Puttick

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780312172602

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It is often believed that women are oppressed and exploited by the charismatic male leaders of new religious movements. This book exposes the abuse of power within some movements, but also demonstrates that there is more evidence of fulfillment and empowerment. This book explores the social and spiritual issues tracing developments from the 1960s counter-culture to 1990s Goddess spirituality and culminates in a new typology of religious needs and values.

The Souls of Womenfolk
The Souls of Womenfolk

Author: Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2021-09-13

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1469663619

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Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues—requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category. Women responded on many levels—ethically, ritually, and communally—to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.

Women and World Religions
Women and World Religions

Author: Denise Lardner Carmody

Publisher: Prentice Hall

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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An exploration of the impact that religious experience, symbols, doctrines, and rituals have had on women worldwide -- from Buddhism to Catholicism.