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Trans/formations is a new addition to "SCM's Controversies in Contextual Theology" series. Like anything coming from Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, it is controversial and challenging as well as highly original. The book will: make visible a range of trans lived experience [transgendered and transsexual], offer theological reflection on these experiences, create challenging theology from this experiential base, and provide a resource for churches and theology students not to date available. It includes an excellent range of contributors, including Elizabeth Stuart and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. This is a valuable addition to reading lists of courses on religion, gender and the body.
We are living in a food and body image obsessed culture. We are encouraged to over-consume by the marketing and media that surround us and then berated by those same forces for doing so. At the same time, we are bombarded with images of unnaturally thin celebrities who go to enormous lengths to retain an unrealistic body image, either by extremes of dieting or through plastic surgery or both. The spiritual realm is not immune from these pressures, as can be seen in the flourishing of biblically and faith based weight loss programs that encourage women to lose weight physically and gain spiritually. Isherwood examines this environment in light of Christian tradition, which has often had a dif...
An introduction to one of the most challenging areas of contextual theology. Queer theology is a significant new development and central to much current teaching and thinking about gender, sexuality and the body.
This book sets out to examine the ambiguous relationship that Christianity has with the body. Incarnation is central to Christian belief but that doctrine has not encouraged a positive theology of the body. The authors explore why this has been so and examine ways in which a more body-positive theology can be developed using our Christian heritage. Starting from a feminist perspective they reclaim women's bodies from the embrace of patriarchy and in doing so clearly show how this reclamation challenges many systems of oppression. This work illustrates that the personal is political, even in theology!
Marcella Althaus-Reid was one of the most fascinating and controversial theologians of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her strong personality and her iconoclastic work inspired a whole generation of theologians in the UK and worldwide. Marcella's creative life was cut short by her death from cancer in 2009. Yet she lives on, not least in those who have been inspired by her work and continue to engage with it. "Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots" draws together a number of world-class scholars and others who engage with the main themes of Marcella's work and show how the critical and controversial conversations which Marcella has begun can and do continue. It is therefore far more than a Festschrift, but a celebration of an intellectual life Marcella-style.
Relational theologies, such as feminist theology, ecotheology and liberation theologies of various kinds, turn our traditional starting point for theology on its head. They ask what it is that we experience. This book aims to explore the concept of the emerging divine within human and non-human relationality.
The problem of otherness is central to debates in both the social sciences and theology. To define the other – by colour, gender, politics, nationality, or religion – is to define the self. Othering has been used through history as a justification for boundary-setting, for conflict and for oppression. Radical Otherness presents a broad overview of otherness in both sociology and theology. The book reveals how social theory can illuminate many contemporary issues in theology, whilst the examination of theological methods can shed light on problematic issues in sociology. The discussion of issues in Radical Otherness moves from the personal to the political, to the hermeneutic, to the ultimate otherness of metaphysics. At each stage, discussion of theory is grounded in concrete examples. The book offers students of ethics, theology, and sociology of religion a clear and engaged assessment of otherness, and opens up new ways for investigating a concept central to the study of both religion and society.
This volume critically engages with the problems traditional Christology raises for feminist theology. It also explores the creative engagements of feminist theologians with the person of Jesus.
Examines some of the most extreme approaches to the body that our society engages with. This book embraces the difficult and challenging areas of the body and society, as an embodied resource for the ever-expanding task of considering the nature of incarnation through the lens of body theology.
Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality provides a much-needed overview of the state of scholarship on Christian theological reflection on sexuality and sexual theology. Critically, it also intervenes in the cultural debate over sexuality by privileging feminist, queer, and other counter-normative perspectives. Comprising twenty-three chapters by a team of international contributors this volume is divided into four parts: • Normativity and transgression • Bodies • Economies and violence • Divinity. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including consideration of the complexities of Christian theology in regard to contemporary sexuality debates. Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality is essential reading for students and researchers in the field of religion, sexuality, and Christianity.