Making Sense of Feminist Theology Today

Abstract

Feminist theology today denotes a widening field of scholarship that shares historic, pragmatic concerns about gender justice in diverse cultural and racial contexts, but that increasingly differs in approach. In this essay, we discuss internal, creative challenges surfacing in (largely Christian) feminist theologies and review the historical social movements that have shaped them up to the present. Theologians who use race, queer, and postcolonial theory to assert the co‐constituting dynamics of gender with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion are muddying the waters of older feminisms that focused exclusively on gender, rendering the future of feminist theologies more ambiguous, broad‐reaching, and fluid.

Love as Enlightenment and Enlightenment as Love: Reading Feminist Hermeneutic of Reconstruction in Vanessa R Sasson’s Yasodhara and the Buddha

“…It seeks to explore what models of criticism are there in place for female agency in Buddhist hagiographical tradition and if such an engagement can be turned to for answers to the larger, perhaps global, questions that feminism deals with. Felski (1989) provides one such model from the perspective of literary critique while Gross (2008), Magee (1995), Muers (2007), Llewellyn and Trzebiatowska (2013), Schneider and Trentaz (2008) and Ursic (2017) help approach the relevance of the spiritual/sacred concerns for with a view to establish connections with the secular. Women’s spirituality does not emerge as antithetical to feminist interests.…”

“…It brings the idea of Yasodhara alive, by reimagining the times and place in which she lived. It becomes an empowering lesson in ‘intellectual innovation rooted in modern historical struggles for liberation’ (Schneider and Trentaz, 2008: 793), making feminist theology fluid not just in the sense Schneider and Trentaz point out among the waves of feminist theology as a field of inquiry, but also in the sense of transcending discourses by flowing freely between theorisation and imaginising through fiction.…”

You Don’t Look Like a Baptist Minister: An Autoethnographic Retrieval of ‘Women’s Experience’ as an Analytic Category for Feminist Theology

“…As Laurel Schneider and Cassie J.E. Trentaz have demonstrated, however, the gap between the compelling, representational theological visions articulated by early feminist theology and the more sophisticated methodological approaches of the next generation is no longer as vast as it was when Jones mapped it (Schneider and Trentaz, 2008). In the 20 years since Jones published her article, theologians and ethicists have developed more sophisticated ways of engaging the field of cultural anthropology and its concurrent ethnographic research methods for the purposes of theological construction.…”