Reforming a Theology of Gender

Reforming a Theology of Gender PDF

Author: Daniel R. Patterson

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-08-11

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1666724068

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Judith Butler and conservative Christian theology are often perceived to be antithetical on questions of gender. In Reforming a Theology of Gender they are shown to be strange bedfellows. By engaging in dialogue with Butler on her terms--desire, violence, and life--this book absorbs the heart of Butler's critique, revealing a righteous law and a seductive image in conservative theologies of gender. The law of Adam and Eve manifests in the unjust administration of guilt, grief, and death. By confronting this law, which in fact condemns all in their bodies, further reflection on Butler's thought leads to thinking about where one finds life in one's body of death. The seductive image of Adam and Eve is revealed to be a false hope and a site that induces slave morality or body-works-based righteousness. Butler's voice is strangely prophetic because it calls the church to offer hope and life by reorienting its gaze from the beautiful yet lifeless bodies of Adam and Eve to the bloodied and scarred, risen body of Jesus Christ. Gender, in the end, is shown to be a vocation of becoming what one is not.

Reforming a Theology of Gender

Reforming a Theology of Gender PDF

Author: Daniel R. Patterson

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2022-08-11

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1666731498

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Judith Butler and conservative Christian theology are often perceived to be antithetical on questions of gender. In Reforming a Theology of Gender they are shown to be strange bedfellows. By engaging in dialogue with Butler on her terms—desire, violence, and life—this book absorbs the heart of Butler’s critique, revealing a righteous law and a seductive image in conservative theologies of gender. The law of Adam and Eve manifests in the unjust administration of guilt, grief, and death. By confronting this law, which in fact condemns all in their bodies, further reflection on Butler’s thought leads to thinking about where one finds life in one’s body of death. The seductive image of Adam and Eve is revealed to be a false hope and a site that induces slave morality or body-works-based righteousness. Butler’s voice is strangely prophetic because it calls the church to offer hope and life by reorienting its gaze from the beautiful yet lifeless bodies of Adam and Eve to the bloodied and scarred, risen body of Jesus Christ. Gender, in the end, is shown to be a vocation of becoming what one is not.

Gender Grace

Gender Grace PDF

Author: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 1990-05-03

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780830812974

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From brain structure and role models to the creation drama and the new covenant, Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen helps us to understand more clearly the forces--and the freedoms--that shape our lives.

The Sexual Reformation

The Sexual Reformation PDF

Author: Aimee Byrd

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0310125650

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What does it mean to be a woman or a man created in the image of God? Many Christians don't have a good grasp of what their sexuality means. Many women in the church don't feel like their contributions matter. Why is this? The church is sadly still confused about what it means to be a man or a woman. While secular society talks about sexuality in terms of liberation, many in the church define manhood and womanhood in terms of reductive roles that rob us of the dignity of personhood, created in the image of God. In her poetic, theologically contemplative style, Aimee Byrd invites you to enter the rich treasure trove of the Song of Songs as its lyrics reveal how our very bodies are visible signs that tell us something about our God. This often-ignored biblical book has much to teach us about Christ, his church, man, and woman. And what it teaches us is not a list of roles and hierarchy. It is a love song. As it unfolds throughout the canon of Scripture, the meaning of our sexuality extends beyond biology, nature, and culture to give us a glimpse of what is to come. This meaningfulness reinforces our discipleship as we participate in the eschatological song. In The Sexual Reformation, you will discover the beautiful message that our bodies—and our whole selves—are part of the greater story in which Christ received the gift of his bride, the church. Within the context of that story, you'll rediscover your sexuality as a gift.

The Reformation of the Heart

The Reformation of the Heart PDF

Author: Sarah Apetrei

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-12-19

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0192572989

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The Reformation of the Heart: Gender and Radical Theology in the English Revolution offers fresh insight into the relationship between radical theology and gender radicalism in the English Revolution. It addresses together two themes which have long fascinated historians of the period: the intellectual formation of religious radicalism, and the prominence of women as prophets and preachers in radical sects. Sarah Apetrei explores the remarkable ideas and reforming visions of a levelling and highly mystical network in the period of civil conflict, the regicide, and its aftermath—a network which linked military chaplains with inspired women and congregations across England. Drawing on both printed works and previously unexamined manuscript evidence, Apetrei discovers that revolutionary radicals were both more theologically daring, and more unified in their support for women's participation, than we have hitherto thought. On one side, the army chaplains and radical preachers developed a highly original theology of gender, conceiving of a female principle in the Godhead. They were also explicit advocates of women's preaching to an extent previously unacknowledged. Concomitantly, women's involvement in preaching and publishing during this period of crisis fostered innovative thinking. In a climate in which Reformed teachings about the limits of election were being reasserted, women were pioneers in teaching the doctrine of universal salvation or 'general redemption'. Female theologians and visionaries also played a prominent part in the dissemination of ideas, drawn from European radical reformations and condemned by the magisterial churches, about the 'heavenly flesh' of Christ and its appearance in the bodies of the saints in the last days. They used highly feminized, maternal imagery to discuss Christ. As such, this book also contributes to feminist epistemology. It shows how, as a group with distinctive experiences, priorities, and cultural identities, the involvement of women in religious reform and the conception of ideas can be truly transformative.

Gender and Theology

Gender and Theology PDF

Author: Elaine Wainwright

Publisher: SCM Press

Published: 2012-08-31

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13: 0334031206

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Concilium has long been a household-name for cutting-edge critical and constructive theological thinking. Past contributors include leading Catholic scholars such as Hans Küng, Gregory Baum and Edward Schillebeeckx, and the editors of the review belong to the international "who's who" in the world of contemporary theology. Published five times a year, each issue reflects a deep knowledge and scholarship presented in a highly readable style, and each issue offers a wide variety of viewpoints from leading thinkers from all over the world.

Reforming Sodom

Reforming Sodom PDF

Author: Heather R. White

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1469624125

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With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality. White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity.

The Flesh and the Feminine

The Flesh and the Feminine PDF

Author: Ruth Gouldbourne

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-06-01

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1556351283

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During the sixteenth-century reformations, Caspar Schwenckfeld was one of the mavericks and creative thinkers who made up the amorphous grouping of radicals. At the time, and since, much has been made of the number of women who were attracted to his theology. Various reasons for this have been suggested, ranging from the attractions of a well spoken nobleman through to the pull of a more domestic religion. This study argues that the attraction lay in the theology that Schwenckfeld explored and offered, and the ways in which it destabilized the accepted social and biological definitions of gender identity.

Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics

Sexual Difference, Gender, and Agency in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics PDF

Author: Faye Bodley-Dangelo

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0567679322

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This volume is a critical and constructive analysis of the sexually differentiated self in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatic. It secures in his Christocentric pattern of human agency an untapped resource for unsettling and reimagining the heteropatriarchal structure of human fellowship at the heart of his theological anthropology. Moving through Barth's doctrines of revelation, creation, theological anthropology, and special ethics, Faye Bodley-Dangelo locates the human agent in his broader project aimed at re-habilitating the subject of modern protestant theology. She argues the human actor comes into view as the recipient of Christ's redemptive activity, which redirects it out of self-aggrandizing isolation and into relationships of dependency, responsiveness, and ethical responsibility to multiple sites of divine and creaturely alterity. The book debates that Barth's model of human agency cannot on its own terms sustain his version of female subordination nor his repudiation of same-sex relationships. Rather, it contains ethically-oriented, critical and reflective mechanisms that resist the sexist heterosexist dimension of his theological anthropology and lend themselves to an anti-essentialist performative account of gender.

Shameless

Shameless PDF

Author: Nadia Bolz-Weber

Publisher: Convergent Books

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1601427603

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Raw, intimate, and timely—a no-holds-barred celebration of our bodies that flies in the face of antiquated ideas about sex and gender. “A triumph.”—Glennon Doyle • “One of the most important, life-changing books I’ve ever read.”—Rachel Held Evans, author of Searching for Sunday and Inspired Negative messages about sex come from all corners of society: from the church, from the media, from our own families. As a result, countless people have suffered pain, guilt, and judgment. In this instant bestseller, Nadia Bolz-Weber unleashes her critical eye and her vulnerable yet hopeful soul on the harmful conversations about sex that have fed our shame. Bolz-Weber offers no simple amendments or polite compromises. Instead, this modern-day reverend calls for an inclusivity that empowers us to be loyal to people and, perhaps most important, ourselves. “Christianity is not a program for avoiding mistakes,” she writes. “It is a faith of the guilty.” With an alternative understanding of Scripture passages that have been weaponized against Christians for decades, Bolz-Weber reminds us that sexual flourishing can and should be for all genders, all bodies, and all humans. She shares stories, poetry, and Scripture that wage war on perpetual anxiety around sex by celebrating sexuality in all its forms and recognizing it for the gift that it is. If you’ve been mistreated, confused, angered, and/or wounded by shaming sexual messages, this one is for you.