How Gender Transforms, Yet Persists in Shaping Sacred Authority

How Gender Transforms, Yet Persists in Shaping Sacred Authority PDF Author: Catherine Crowder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
My dissertation's story begins in 1976, when the General Convention of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. (ECUSA) voted to approve the ordination of women to the priesthood, which had previously been closed to women. In the years since, both women and men have been ordained to the priesthood in ECUSA and empowered to hold the sacred authority to consecrate sacraments. This drastic shift in the practices of sacramental ministry is a meaningful change to the material and immaterial dimensions of religious practice, and gender as a lived reality for ECUSA adherents. In this study, I examine the reverberations of the changes associated with women's ordination, drawing on interviews with ECUSA clergy and laity to examine how these respondents are still wrestling with questions of meaning and practice. I offer a theoretical formulation of gender not as one social structure, but rather as a multiplicity of social structures bound together by their common origin in the social organization of reproduction. Each instance of gender as a social structure, including sacramental ministry, is open to change, following the process I show unfolding in ECUSA: changing practices, discarding old schemas, making meaning by importing meaning from other instance of gender as social structure, and building new schemas which oppose one another therefore constructing two new instances of social structure where previously there had been one. My primary theoretical contribution in this dissertation is to propose a new model, The Hydra Model, which illustrates this process of social change to gender, and which I argue can be applied to other instances of change to gender as social structure. Empirically, I contribute a case study of how such changes unfold, showing what happens to the meaning of sacraments, to the immaterial dimension of sacred authority, when the gender of sacramental ministers broadens to include women as well as men. Understanding how meanings change in structures as apparently eternal as gender and religion equips social analysts to contend with the reverberations of changes like the approval of women's ordination, and to anticipate how such changes to practice might be visible in meanings and deeply-held beliefs.

How Gender Transforms, Yet Persists in Shaping Sacred Authority

How Gender Transforms, Yet Persists in Shaping Sacred Authority PDF Author: Catherine Crowder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
My dissertation's story begins in 1976, when the General Convention of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. (ECUSA) voted to approve the ordination of women to the priesthood, which had previously been closed to women. In the years since, both women and men have been ordained to the priesthood in ECUSA and empowered to hold the sacred authority to consecrate sacraments. This drastic shift in the practices of sacramental ministry is a meaningful change to the material and immaterial dimensions of religious practice, and gender as a lived reality for ECUSA adherents. In this study, I examine the reverberations of the changes associated with women's ordination, drawing on interviews with ECUSA clergy and laity to examine how these respondents are still wrestling with questions of meaning and practice. I offer a theoretical formulation of gender not as one social structure, but rather as a multiplicity of social structures bound together by their common origin in the social organization of reproduction. Each instance of gender as a social structure, including sacramental ministry, is open to change, following the process I show unfolding in ECUSA: changing practices, discarding old schemas, making meaning by importing meaning from other instance of gender as social structure, and building new schemas which oppose one another therefore constructing two new instances of social structure where previously there had been one. My primary theoretical contribution in this dissertation is to propose a new model, The Hydra Model, which illustrates this process of social change to gender, and which I argue can be applied to other instances of change to gender as social structure. Empirically, I contribute a case study of how such changes unfold, showing what happens to the meaning of sacraments, to the immaterial dimension of sacred authority, when the gender of sacramental ministers broadens to include women as well as men. Understanding how meanings change in structures as apparently eternal as gender and religion equips social analysts to contend with the reverberations of changes like the approval of women's ordination, and to anticipate how such changes to practice might be visible in meanings and deeply-held beliefs.

Reasoning Together

Reasoning Together PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806168609
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation. Janice Acoose infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language; Lisa Brooks looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them; Tol Foster argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers; LeAnne Howe creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates; Daniel Heath Justice takes on two prominent critics who see mixed-blood identities differently than he does in relation to kinship; Phillip Carroll Morgan uncovers written Choctaw literary criticism from the 1830s on the subject of oral performance; Kimberly Roppolo advocates an intertribal rhetoric that can form a linguistic foundation for criticism. Cheryl Suzack situates feminist theories within Native culture with an eye to applying them to subjugated groups across Indian Country; Christopher B. Teuton organizes Native literary criticism into three modes based on community awareness; Sean Teuton opens up new sites for literary performance inside prisons with Native inmates; Robert Warrior wants literary analysis to consider the challenges of eroticism; Craig S. Womack introduces the book by historicizing book-length Native-authored criticism published between 1986 and 1997, and he concludes the volume with an essay on theorizing experience. Reasoning Together proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism, closing the gap between theory and activism by situating Native literature in real-life experiences and tribal histories. It is an accessible collection that will suit a wide range of courses—and will educate and energize anyone engaged in criticism of Native literature.

The IVP Women's Bible Commentary

The IVP Women's Bible Commentary PDF Author: Catherine Clark Kroeger
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 9780830814374
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 918

Get Book Here

Book Description
This commentary edited by Catherine Clark Kroeger and Mary Evans is an attempt to answer the question, What happens when we look at Scripture through women's eyes? New and helpful insights from an international team of scholars show how Scripture is relevant to women and men alike, making it a wonderful complement to other commentaries.

Schools of Fiction

Schools of Fiction PDF Author: Morgan Day Frank
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192867504
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Schools of Fiction, Morgan Day Frank considers a bizarre but integral feature of the modern educational experience: that teachers enthusiastically teach literary works that have terrible things to say about school. From Ishmael's insistence in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick that a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, to the unnamed narrator's expulsion from his southern college in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the most frequently taught books in the English curriculum tend to be those that cast the school as a stultifying and inhumane social institution. Why have educators preferred the anti-scholasticism of the American romance tradition to the didacticism of sentimentalists? Why have they organized African American literature as a discursive category around texts that despaired of the post-Reconstruction institutional system? Why did they start teaching novels, that literary form whose very nature, in Mikhail Bakhtin's words, is not canonic? Reading literature in class is a paradoxical undertaking that, according to Day Frank, has proved foundational to the development of American formal education over the last two centuries, allowing the school to claim access to a social world external to itself. By drawing attention to the transformative effect literature has had on the school, Schools of Fiction challenges some of our core assumptions about the nature of cultural administration and the place of English in the curriculum. The educational system, Day Frank argues, has depended historically on the cultural objects whose existence it is ordinarily thought to govern and the academic subject it is ordinarily thought to have marginalized.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.

Situated Lives

Situated Lives PDF Author: Louise Lamphere
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135250510
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Get Book Here

Book Description
Situated Lives brings together the most important recent feminist and critical research that situates gender in relationship to the historical and material circumstances where gender, race, class and sexual orientation intersect and shape everyday interaction. Contributors include: Barbara Babcock, Jean Comaroff, Sarah Franklin, Faye Ginsburg, Matthew Gutmann, Faye V. Harrison, Louise Lamphere, Ellen Lewin, Jos^'e Lim^'on, Iris Lopez, Emily Martin, Mary Moran, Kirin Narayan, Aihwa Ong, Devon G. Pe^~na, Beatriz Pesquera, Helena Ragon^'e, Rayna Rapp, Judith Rollins, Leslie Salzinger, Denise Segura, Carol Stack, Ann Stoler, Donald D. Stull, Brett Williams, Patricia Zavella.

Refiguring the Sacred Feminine

Refiguring the Sacred Feminine PDF Author: Theresa M. DiPasquale
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0820705195
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theresa M. DiPasquale’s study of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton demonstrates how each of these seventeenth century English poets revised, reformed, and renewed the Judeo-Christian tradition of the sacred feminine. The central figures of this tradition—divine Wisdom, created Wisdom, the Bride, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Ecclesia—are essential to the works of Donne, Lanyer, and Milton. All three poets are deeply invested in the ancient, scripturally authorized belief that the relationship between God and humankind is gendered: God is father, bridegroom, king; the human soul and the church as corporate entity are daughter, bride, and consort. This important text not only casts new light on these poets and on the history of Christian doctrine and belief, but also makes enormous contributions to our understanding of the feminine more broadly. It will be of interest to scholars who study the Literary Studies, religion, and culture of early modern England, to feminist theologians, and to any reader grappling seriously with gender issues in Christian theology and spirituality.

A Sea of Stories

A Sea of Stories PDF Author: John Dececco, Phd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135835713
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Take a look at how narrative has shaped gay and lesbian culture A Sea of Stories: The Shaping Power of Narrative in Gay and Lesbian Cultures: A Festschrift for John P. De Cecco is an unforgettable collection of personal narratives that explores the historical, psychological, and sociological contexts of homosexuality in locations ranging from Nazi Germany to Colorado. Some of the prominent authors in this collection include David Bergman, Louis Crew, Diana Hume George, and Ruth Vanita. Scholars in gay and lesbian studies, political movements, cultural studies, and narratology, and anyone interested in gay history will want to explore these intriguing narratives on topics such as sex and sin in the South, selling gay literature before Stonewall, growing up gay in India, and the story of an interracial male couple facing homophobic ignorance in a small town. A Sea of Stories also contains creative fiction and nonfiction love stories, war stories, oral stories, and bibliographies, and a beautiful post-Stonewell and post-modern narrative set on a South African seascape that tells the story of two professional men and the possibility of a kiss. For a complete list of contents, please visit our Web site at www.haworthpressinc.com. This book offers you a variety of narratives that cover a wide range, including: memoirs of gay Holocaust survivors and the emergence of the first lesbian and gay book club in its wake homophobia in the workplace and the use of coming-out stories to enhance workplace diversity the establishment of a gay/straight alliance in a Salt Lake City high school that is heavily dominated by Mormons gay literary heritage that examines the works of Langston Hughes as well as Martin Duberman, Paul Monette, and Edmund White in relation to the lesbian 70s creative nonfiction about a woman's love for another woman, her lifelong friend Provincetown's remarkable community response to the AIDS epidemic A collection of chapters written by the colleagues and former students of John P. De Cecco, pioneering editor of the Journal of Homosexuality, A Sea of Stories takes its title from a phrase Dr. De Cecco used in his keynote address to the “History and Memory” conference at Allegheny College in 1997. This conference sparked the idea for this collection of essays that examine the homosexual experience through historical, psychological, and sociological viewpoints and homosexuality in literature. These courageous stories will assist readers to know themselves more deeply, to identify wih others, and to interpret gay and lesbian experiences in different narrative forms.

African Religions

African Religions PDF Author: Jacob K. Olupona
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199790582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.

What Men Owe to Women

What Men Owe to Women PDF Author: John C. Raines
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791491552
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
What Men Owe to Women brings together a distinguished group of male scholars to address gender justice in world religions. It includes contributions representing a wide range of traditions: Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Taoism, Buddhism, and African and Native American religions. This book acknowledges the patriarchal overload of these traditions and institutes a creative search for the helpful, but neglected, resources of the traditions themselves. The contributors show how these resources support the economic and political empowerment of women and assist a rethinking of gender relations in terms of genuine mutuality. In addition they share information on their own lives and those of the women in their families that illuminate the discussion. The book builds upon the enormous international feminist literature that has indicted the religions of the world for their insensitivity to women and their sacralization of sexism. It then looks into the causes of the fear that underlies much sexism and studies the distortion of religious symbols that supports sexism and masks men's obligations. Contributors include, Marvin M. Ellison, Asghar Ali Engineer, Farid Esack, Ze'ev W. Falk, Christopher Ronwanièn:te Jocks, Daniel C. Maguire, Mutombo Nkulu-N'Sengha, Tavivat Puntarigvivat, John C. Raines, Gerard S. Sloyan, Anantanand Rambachan, and Liu Xiaogan.