I was the little girl who always wanted to be at church, who felt compelled to tell people about the goodness of God, but because my religious communities did not allow women to be church leaders, I never imagined this was a path I could pursue. As an undergraduate, I was captured by the academic study of the Bible and could not imagine doing anything else with my life. Now, for the past 20+ years, I have been teaching the Bible in academic and ecclesial settings and have become one of many good scholars who are making a case that the Christian God fully values men and women.
No other book has helped me understand the categories of sex and gender and given me the language to define them. Even more important, that clarity has given me the confidence to affirm the goodness of different created bodies and allow the beautiful variety in which those bodies serve God’s kingdom.
In recent years, the issue of gender has become a topic of great importance and has generated discussion from the kitchen table to the academy. It is an issue that churches and Christian educational institutions are grappling with as well, since gender is a crucial aspect of identity, affecting how we engage socially and understand our embodiment. Upstream from all these conversations lies a more basic question: What is gender?
In Gender as Love, Fellipe do Vale takes a theological approach to understanding gender, employing both biblical exegesis and historical theology and emphasizing the role human love plays in shaping…
No other exegesis has been as formative for my reading of Mary as Gaventa’s.
Because I was privileged to sit in her classroom and hear her teach about some of these passages, I began to realize how exciting it is to pay attention to the story of Mary in the New Testament. Each time I read her clarity and insights, I am inspired.
In this lucid account of Jesus' mother, Gaventa emphasizes a literary approach, addressing in turn: Matthew, Luke-Acts, John, and the second-century work, Protevangelium of James. In a style accessible to students and general readers, the author also provides scholars with much to ponder.
Fathers, sons, brothers, kings. Does the predominantly masculine symbolism of the Biblical writings exclude women or overlook the riches of their spiritual life? If Christ is 'the second Adam' and the one on whom all Christian life must be patterned, then what about Eve? This book from a leading scholar of religious language and feminism opens up the Bible's imagery for sex, gender, and kinship and does so by discussing its place in the central teachings of Christian theology: the doctrine of God and spirituality, Imago Dei and anthropology, Creation, Christology and the Cross, the Trinity, and eschatology.
This magisterial book opened my eyes to the connections between desire and God. It also showed me that experience matters for Christian theology; it is, after all, a faith that values human reality.
From the first time I read it until now, Coakley remains one of my theological heroes.
God, Sexuality and the Self is a new venture in systematic theology. Sarah Coakley invites the reader to re-conceive the relation of sexual desire and the desire for God and - through the lens of prayer practice - to chart the intrinsic connection of this relation to a theology of the Trinity. The goal is to integrate the demanding ascetical undertaking of prayer with the recovery of lost and neglected materials from the tradition and thus to reanimate doctrinal reflection both imaginatively and spiritually. What emerges is a vision of human longing for the triune God which is both edgy…
As an Orthodox theologian, Behr-Sigel’s theological take was different enough from mine to keep me intrigued. That made her love of Mary, which I shared, even more powerful.
In her writing, I saw ideas I had felt were true but had not yet been able to put into words. Moreover, her collected writings demonstrate the ability to change one’s mind over time, giving me the encouragement that others could do the same.
'With great joy, I recommend this book to all serious readers, to those who are ready to put aside their prejudices. May it be the first swallow that announces the coming of spring'-Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (England). This book, by a leading theolgian, is a serious reexamination of the role of women in the Church. For Orthodox and Roman Catholics, especially, the question of women's ordination must be asked 'from the inside' and not only 'from the outside'. This book does not suggest final answers, but raises issues and defines their relative importance.
Is God a man? Christians say “no.” God is Creator—not creation—so cannot be sexed. On the other hand, Jesus is male, and Christians affirm that Jesus is God.
My book dives into these complicated waters, wrestling with Christian traditions to affirm Jesus’ maleness but deny that God as God is male or masculine. Unsurprisingly, the best way to speak and think of God correctly is to pay attention to the incarnation, when God became human. God decided to become human by being born of a woman. Mary demonstrates both the honor God bestows upon women’s bodies and also the fact that women are not limited to motherhood but empowered by the same Spirit to prophesy, teach, and proclaim.
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump…
Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism
It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…
