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"Upon it's publication in 1975, Man As Male and Female, a study of Scripture in which Paul Jewett argues that man and woman are properly related only when they accept each other as equals, received much critical acclaim.Now, in The Ordination of Women, Jewett argues that on the basis of the Christian ideal of the partnership of the sexes, women ought to share fully with men the privileges and responsibilities of church ministry.
The Priestly Office of Women: God's gift to a Renewed Church is the English translation of the second edition of Dr. Ida Raming's classic study of the exclusion of women from ordination in the Western Christian Church, The Exclusion of Women from the Priesthood: Divine Law or Sex Discrimination? (SCP, 1976). This new edition includes a bibliography on women's ordination from 1973 to the present plus three recent essays by Dr. Raming and a complete translation of the Latin sources cited by Dr. Raming.
The growth of women's ordained ministry is one of the most remarkable and significant developments in the recent history of Christianity. This collection of essays brings together leading contributors from both academic and church contexts to explore Christian experiences of ordaining women in theological, sociological, historical and anthropological perspective. Key questions include: How have national, denominational and ecclesial cultures shaped the different ways in which women's ordination is debated and/or enacted? What differences have women's ordained ministry, and debates on women's ordination, made in various church contexts? What 'unfinished business' remains (in both congregational and wider ministry)? How have Christians variously conceived ordained ministry which includes both women and men? How do ordained women and men work together in practice? What have been the particular implications for female clergy? And for male clergy? What distinctive issues are raised by women's entry into senior ordained/leadership positions? How do episcopal and non-episcopal traditions differ in this?
The Roman Catholic leadership still refuses to ordain women officially or even to recognize that women are capable of ordination. But is the widely held assumption that women have always been excluded from such roles historically accurate? How might the current debate change if our view of the history of women's ordination were to change? In The Hidden History of Women's Ordination, Gary Macy argues that for the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were in fact ordained into various roles in the church. He uncovers references to the ordination of women in papal, episcopal and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. The insistence among scholars that women were not ordained, Macy shows, is based on a later definition of ordination, one that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages.
This work presents a consideration of the theological issues involved in the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood.
For non-specialist readers, the series offers scholarly research on the role of women in Christian ministry and the changing shape of ministry in Christian history. In the first volume, Gary Macy (theology and religious studies, U. of San Diego) discusses the ordination of women in the early middle ages, and John Hilary Martin (Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Berkeley, California) looks at the ordination of women and the theologians in the Middle Ages. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Writing as a seminary-trained sociologist, Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr. concentrates on the roles of clergywomen in five denominations—Episcopal, United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Southern Baptist, and Roman Catholic. He maintains that behind the façade of equanimity, women are often relegated to the outskirts of church hierarchy. In compelling stories, we learn about the Episcopal woman denied a job because she was too short; the Methodist women burdened by the old saw of women preachers being like dogs walking on their hind legs; the Evangelical Lutheran who, in protest to her denomination's trickle-down reform, camped outside her bishop's office; and Roman Catholic women who, frustrated and beleaguered by their church's refusal to ordain them, become active reformers. To substantiate his assertion that churches are cultures as well as organizations, Schmidt examines both official policies regarding women's ordination in each denomination and the cultural context in which those policies must play out. Through their stories, the clergywomen remind us that the church influences society whether society acknowledges it or not.