In Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Marti Kheel explores the underlying worldview of "nature ethics," offering an alternative ecofeminist approach. Seeking to heal the divisions between the seemingly disparate movements and philosophies of feminism, animal advocacy, environmental ethics, and holistic health, Kheel proposes an ecofeminist philosophy that underscores the importance of empathy and care for individual beings as well as larger wholes.

As the all-nurturing earth mother goddess. Ruether points out that merely replacing a transcendent male deity with a female one does not answer the "god-problem." What we need, in her view, is a vision of a much more abundant and creative source of life. "A healed relation to each other and to the earth calls for a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality." writes Ruether. "We need to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize (...) the. (shrink)

In this article, Rosemary Ruether details the development of the Roman Catholic Women’s ordination movement in the US and the emergence of the Women-church Movement as a critique of the drive to ordain women and recreate the clerical caste system. She then outlines the emergence of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests Movement which decided to find bishops and proceed with women’s ordination. She explores the disagreements between these two movements and a way to resolve this by accepting different contexts (...) for the two movements. (shrink)

This article traces the development of the idea of God from the ancient Near East thought into Patristic Christianity with its fusion with Greek philosophy. The article details five patterns that shape the way in which God language in Christianity influences social and political systems: androcentrism or male domination over women; anthropocentrism or human domination over nature; ethnocentrism or the domination of a `chosen' people over other people; militarism, and asceticism or the dualism and hierarchy of mind over body. It (...) also suggests how these patterns of domination can be dismantled and more mutual relations between God, humans and nature developed. (shrink)

This article traces opposition to women's contraceptive rights moving from the role of St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to the modern day role of the Vatican. Traditional views of women and sexuality have been challenged by modern feminism but Catholicism is still pursuing a global crusade against abortion, birth control, and redefinitions of the family that might include homosexual couples. This means opposing sex education curricula and opposition to state funding for family planning assistance. But the Catholic crusades against women's (...) reproductive rights have generated rebellion among some Catholics worldwide. This is led by Catholics for a Free Choice and the SeeChange campaign. (shrink)

This book addresses the practical relevance of the interconnection of feminism, ecology, and religious theological thought, and asks questions about the lack of attention to gender issues in both ecological theology and deglobalization theory. The book looks at issues of globalization, interfaith ecological theology, ecofeminism, and deglobalization movements comparatively across different world religions and across geographical regions.

Elucidates the theological and historical understanding of church as a community of liberation from sexism, describes a complete revisioning of the sacramental fundamentals of baptism and eucharist, and details women's liturgies and sacramental forms.

A fascinating collection of ancient and contemporary readings from the cultural matrix that has shaped Western Christianity, Womanguides is a resource for understanding ideas about gender in Christian tradition and for building alternative patterns that can transform and heal.

Challenges the view that highlights beliefs as a key to defining identity. Author's views on being a Christian; Major factor that has complicated the author's religious identity; Author's dual religious identity as a Buddhist and a Christian.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sexism and Misogyny in the Christian Tradition:Liberating AlternativesRosemary Radford RuetherThe oppressive patterns in Christianity toward women and other subjugated people do not come from specific doctrines, but from a patriarchal and hierarchical reading of the system of Christian symbols as a whole. These same symbols can be read from a prophetic and liberating perspective. So what I will do in this essay is to show how Christian symbols (...) have been read as a system of domination, on the one hand, and then how they can be read as a system of liberation, on the other hand.1 The framework for reading Christian symbols as a system of domination derives from patriarchal slaveocracies, the social system in which Christianity was born. Yet Christianity also began as critique of this system that proposed prophetic-liberating alternatives to it that were then partially repressed.The New Testament is shaped in the context of this struggle. It contains testimonies to a subversive vision which has been partly repressed by reimposed patriarchal patterns. Thus the New Testament itself is the main source both for canonizing a sexist and slave social system and also for reconstructing an alternative egalitarian vision. In this essay I will first summarize the patriarchal reading of Christianity as it became the dominant interpretation between the second and sixth centuries, with further elaboration in medieval scholasticism. I will address this reading of Christianity under the five symbols of anthropology, sin and grace, God, Christ, and the Church. This will show that the patriarchal reading of these symbols is not a problem of the prejudices of particular theologians, but a comprehensive worldview. I will then analyze these same symbols and show how they can (and, in my view, should) be read from a prophetic-liberating perspective.I begin with the issue of anthropology. How is gender, male and female, related to humanness? Early Christianity saw a close relation between the human soul, understood as mind or reason, and the divine logos, which was seen as the divine nature of Jesus as the Christ. They interpreted the text of Genesis 1:27, “God created the human in the image of God,” to refer to the mind or soul in each human person. The human soul as mind or reason mirrors on a created level the divine logos or reason manifest in Christ. The human soul thus partakes in a created fashion in God’s nature and so is immortal and capable of eternal life. [End Page 83]But do women possess reason? Are they made in the image of God, or only male humans? The Greek philosophical tradition, particularly in Aristotle, which shaped early Christian views on this, believed that women lacked autonomous reason and were therefore inherently inferior and dependent on the male. For Aristotle, slaves and Asians (i.e., barbarians) were also dependent on ruling-class Greek males, who alone were fully rational.2 Thus Greek philosophy gave Christianity both a strongly gendered and also a classist and racist reading of anthropology.The Jewish tradition was ambivalent about whether women were equally made in the image of God. Some rabbinic teachers defended the belief that women were equally made in God’s image, while others argued that Adam alone was God’s image.3 This ambivalence is reflected in Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11. Here Paul says, “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife and God is the head of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:3, NRS). Paul lays out a cosmic hierarchical order of headship of God over Christ, Christ over the male human, and the male human over the female human as the basis for his argument that the woman should cover her head, but the male should not cover his head. “For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but the woman is the reflection of man” (1 Cor. 11:7).Paul goes on to insist that “man was not made from woman but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but... (shrink)

Feminist Theology is not just a western phenomenon. It has roots in many traditions. After its development in the United States in the 1970s, it quickly expanded to include black, Latina and Asian women in the US. At the same time third world women in Africa, Asia and Latin America were developing Feminist Theology and it was finding expression in Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Today Feminist Theology is both global and interreligious.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross as Pioneer in the Study of Women and ReligionRosemary Radford RuetherRita Gross has been a pioneer in shaping both the theory and practice of women and religion and in Feminist theology. Her pathbreaking work in these fields has received insufficient recognition among both feminists and scholars of religion. This session at the 2010 AAR meeting devoted to her work is a small rectification of this neglect. (...) Rita has written more than 150 articles and written or edited around ten books. Three of these volumes—Beyond Androcentrism (1977), Feminism and Religion (1996), and A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religion Explorations (2009)—span her writing career and exemplify her contributions to the field of women and religion.As Rita Gross makes clear, she went to the University of Chicago in the 1960s to explore the field of comparative religion, not to study women in religion explicitly. She was forced into this focus on women and has continued to return to this concern because of the resistance of the scholars in this field to paying attention to the ways in which half of humanity—women—participates in religion. Her concerns with women's roles in religion were shaped in response to the attitude of her mentors at the University of Chicago who insisted that what women did in religion was unimportant and was, in any case, covered by studying what men did in religion. One of these mentors ridiculed her by asking if she did not realize that the masculine is generic for humanness as a whole and so "includes the feminine." At most one might mention men's view of women. What women themselves think and do is irrelevant. At that time there were very few women in doctoral studies in religion at Chicago, and their teachers made clear that any concern with women as subjects of religion was a sure way to terminate their careers in the field.It was in responding to these kinds of messages from her teachers that Rita began to craft, in the late 1960s and 1970s, a fundamental shift in the methodology of religious studies. This would shape her decision to write her doctoral thesis on women in Australian Aboriginal religion, to edit a group of essays in her 1977 volume, Beyond Androcentrism, as well as doing pioneering work with Nancy Falk in the volume Unspoken Worlds, where they demonstrated the transformative understanding of religions that opens up when scholars focused on women's roles.This methodological shift, which Rita Gross has returned to again and again [End Page 75] through her writings, she called the movement from androcentrism to androgyny. Androcentrism as a bias in religious studies, or any other field, means quite simply the assumption that the male (usually the elite male) is the normative human being. To understand the "essence" of the human in any field it is sufficient to study what this elite male thinks and does. For Rita this is not only an injustice to women, but it also means turning a blind eye to at least half of what is actually going on in this or any other field. In other words, what is wrong about androcentrism as a way of doing study in religion is that it gives one a partial and distorted picture of reality. It is bad empiricism.The shift to androgyny means really looking equally at what women are doing as subjects of religion, not simply adding information about what men think of women. It is not that this information is totally absent or impossible to get. Often it is right there in the primary data, but is ignored by the scholars because of their androcentric bias. Bringing in women's activities and viewpoints as equal does not merely add a missing corner to the picture; it means transforming the whole picture. What men are thinking and doing is relativized and put in a larger context. For example, in understanding Australian Aboriginal religion one discovers not only that are women excluded from men's key rituals, but also that men are excluded from women's key rituals. The whole religion shifts from being understood as male dominant to being... (shrink)

Without negating the important distinctions which Augustine has made in separating the relative polarities of church and empire from the ultimate polarities of eternal life and apostasy, we must find a new relationship of human history to God's call to redemption.

This essay examines two major biblical and theological traditions for ecological commitment: the covenantal tradition, biblical and modern, and the sacramental tradition, biblical and modern. It also asks how we need to reclaim these traditions in the practice of the churches today.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the Haller Zeitung; it will probably not appear at all--it has, among other short, comings, the fault to be too long." In a letter to Schtitz, Niethammer writes from Bamberg on 23 March 1807: "I repeat my urgent demand... to send the review of Salat's book submitted by Prof. Hegel as soon as possible to Jena to hand it in to Hofrat Voigt.... " (...) The volume contains almost 1,000 valuable notes which explain the philosophical and historical background of the newly edited material. HENRY WALTERBRANN Takoma Park, Maryland Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev: Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Trans. with Intro. by Mary-Barbara Zeldin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969. Pp. 203. $7.50) Mary-Barbara Zeldin's translation into English of the Philosophical Letters and the Apology of a Madman, by the enigmatic Russian intellectual leader of the early nineteenth century, Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev makes available in English for the first time the thought of this figure whose small corpus of writings circulated mostly in manuscript during his own lifetime and waited over a hundred years after his death for their complete translation in their original French. Historically Chaadayev is important as a mediator between Westernizers and Slavophiles in this initial period of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual awakening. Chaadayev himself remained aloof from either of these parties, was appealed to by both of them and became himself a kind of martyr to intellectual freedom. His own view of Russian-Western relationships incorporates this problem most remarkably into a theological vision of the "education of the human race." Philosophically Chaadayev stands as a unique and somewhat eccentric synthesizer of German idealism with the Christian concept of salvation history. Perhaps the most remarkable insight to be gained by reading these long-buried essays is the ease with which an Eastern Orthodox Christian versed in Patristic hellenism could fuse the ideas of a paedagogy of the human race in Lessing, Herder and Schiller and read this as an expression of an Irenaean doctrine of the progressive development of a mankind through the mediation of the primordial Logos; an Alexandrian idea of the paedagogy of Christ in history and a Eusebian doctrine of Christian universal empire. In so doing this Russian thinker also reveals to what an extent the German idealist movement itself was grounded on much older syntheses of Christian thought. In the process, however, Chaadayev also shows that nineteenth-century men could only appropriate this heritage anew by taking the great credal themes of revelation, Christi, the church and the Kingdom of God and reissuing them in a secularized, humanistic dress, as a philosophy of history. Chaadayev's basic thesis is that knowledge is a divinely-given deposit of certain fundamental primordial ideas, which man would not have arrived at through his own unaided powers, but rather possesses as an imprint upon the mind of the first man implanted by the Creator. Chaadayev weds the western philosophical concept of a fundamental a priori with a doctrine of primordial revelation, revealing the foundation of man himself in the divine Logos. This primordial deposit of ideas existed in BOOK REVIEWS 495 the first man only as a rudimentary 'image' of God. It is only through historical development that man grows to full stature in these truths whereby he attains to the completed 'likeness' of God. These truths, together with their historical development, are passed down by a historical succession, which is not an ecclesiastical succession, but a succession of the human family. These truths are periodically renewed by the advent of certain extraordinary individuals who exemplify them to a high degree, and by certain elect nations who are divinely designated as their culture-bearers. The Jews of the Old Testament were that culture-bearer in antiquity, and, since the time of Jesus Christ, it is Christendom which stands for and bears the development of this primordial truth as it has been renewed and set forth in archetypal perfection by Christ. Chaadayev sharply down grades the role of the Greeks in this development, but does so in a manner remarkably similar to the ancient Christian apologists who stole Greek fire in order to bathe the... (shrink)

This article examines the consequences of globalization in the lives of women. The author explains the ways in which women, particularly poor women, are victims of globalization and shows how this process has its roots in more than 500 years of Western colonization. The article demonstrates how women’s groups have become important sites of resistance to globalization and how they have also developed different worldviews and ideas of the sacred.

This interreligious dialogue--in which alternating chapters present each woman's thoughts, with a response by the other--grew out of a workshop Gross and Ruether presented in Loveland, Ohio, in 1999. Their conversations range across themes including: What is most problematic about my tradition? What is most liberating about my tradition? What is most inspiring for me about the other tradition? And, finally, religious feminism and the future of the planet. The two feminist thinkers and writers present widely diverging life histories (...) and faiths, but they reach agreement on the issue at hand--what Buddhism and Christianity can offer the struggle to create ecological sustainability. The work has no subject index. c. Book News Inc. (shrink)