Empowering Memory And Movement

Empowering Memory and Movement Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza completes a three volume look across her influential work and career. In Transforming Vision (2011) she drew from a career of pioneering scholarship to offer the contours of a critical feminist hermeneutic. The chapters in Changing Horizons (2013) sketched a theory of liberation. Now, the consequences for a liberating praxis are evident in interviews and essays that look back over personal and movement history, look around at challenges and potentialities, and look ahead to an emancipatory future, the critical engagement with scripture always at the center.

With Empowering Memory and Movement, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza completes a three-volume look across her influential work and career. In Transforming Vision (2011), she drew from decades of pioneering scholarship to offer the contours of a critical feminist hermeneutic. The chapters in Changing Horizons (2013) sketched out a theory of liberation. Now, the consequences for a liberating praxis are elaborated in interviews and essays that chart Schüssler Fiorenza’s own personal and professional history as these are intertwined with the history of the worldwide movement for emancipation and full equality. Empowering Memory and Movement looks back, but also looks around at challenges and potentialities on the global scene, and looks ahead to an emancipatory future, with a critical and wise engagement with scripture and the interpretive tradition always at the center.

The impact of legacies and memories on social movements has been paid only limited attention in what is now a sizeable literature. While there is a growing interest in memory, there is little systematic theory or comparative research on the long-lasting institutional consequences of important events-or how they are remembered by future generations. In Legacies and Memories in Movements, Donatella della Porta and her collaborators examine the concepts of historical legacy and memory, suggesting ways to apply them in analyses of the long-term effects of movements, movement participation, and movement strategies and tactics. In particular, they explore a critical juncture, rich with consequences for social movements: the transition to democracy. Through a comparative-historical study of social movements in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, the authors tease out the complex and varied ways different modes of transition can produce new types and uses of memories for social movements. To do so, they analyze how moments of transition create institutional change that impacts future movements and consider how past protests enhance and constrain social movements today. Focusing on the reverberation of events and how past events serve as guides for the future, Legacies and Memories in Movements brings together the literature on collective memory and social movements.

Against Empire analyzes the relationship between Christian theology and radical democracy by exploring how black prophetic thought, feminist theology, Latin American liberation theology, and peaceable theology offer plural forms of ekklesial resistance to empire: the black church (Cornel West), the ekklesia of wo/men (Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), the church of the poor (Ignacio Ellacuría, Jon Sobrino), and the peaceable church (Stanley Hauerwas). These approaches to Christian political engagement differ in their specific focus but share common resistance to neoliberalism, nationalism, and militarism as networks of power that intersect with racism, sexism, and neo-colonialism to form what they refer to as empire. In diverse ways, West, Schüssler Fiorenza, Ellacuría and Sobrino, and Hauerwas reimagine Christian witness as a form of radical democratic resistance to empire in the face of political formations that not only block the expansion of democracy (neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony) but also attempt to retrench its achievements (authoritarian populism).

The relationship between Islam and feminism is complex. There are many Muslim scholars who fervently promote women's equality. At the same time, there is ambivalence regarding the general norms, terminology, and approaches of feminism and feminist theology. This ambivalence is in large part a product of various hegemonic, androcentric, and patriarchal discourses that seek to dictate legitimate and authoritative interpretations. These discourses not only fuel ambivalence, they also effectively obscure valuable possibilities related to interreligious feminist engagement. Divine Words, Female Voices is the follow-up to Jerusha Lamptey's 2014 book, Never Wholly Other, in which she introduced the idea of "Muslima" theology and applied it to the topic of religious diversity. In this new book, she extends her earlier arguments to contend that interreligious feminist engagement is both a theologically valid endeavor and a vital resource for Muslim women scholars. She introduces comparative feminist theology as a method for overcoming challenges associated with interreligious feminist engagement, reorients comparative discussions to focus on the two "Divine Words" (the Qur'an and Jesus) and feminist theology, and uses this reorientation to examine intersections, discontinuities, and insights related to diverse theological topics. This book is distinctive in its responsiveness to calls for new approaches in Islamic feminist theology, its use of the method of comparative theology, its focus on Muslim and Christian feminist theology in comparative analysis, and its constructive articulation of Muslima theological perspectives.

"Why should we take into account the history of reception in biblical methods? It is because as exegetes we have no choice. Recognizing our dependence on interpretations of the past is not a new method, but it is the very way we understand texts. Régis Burnet shows how this allows us to put our current interpretations into perspective, but also to dialogue with those of the past." --

Reframing Ideas about Feminist Theory and Theology for the 21st Century In Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Gender, and Kyriarchal Power, leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza challenges the tendency in feminist theory to leave behind religion—a space of struggle, resistance, and social transformation—as a place for feminist politics. She also confronts the tendency of religious feminists to view women as if they are all the same, or to limit them to complementary roles with men. Presenting an alternative vision for global justice within the landscape of neoliberal kyriarchy, Schüssler Fiorenza calls upon religious and non-religious feminists to engage in transformation through struggle, friendship, and community. Further, this groundbreaking book’s final chapter opens up the discussion for future feminist work, drawing the reader into an imagined community of feminist readers with whom the reader can agree or disagree, but nevertheless struggle alongside to imagine a more just world.

What do we do when a beloved comedian known as 'America's Dad' is convicted of sexual assault? Or when we discover that the man who wrote 'all men are created equal' also enslaved hundreds of people? Or when priests are exposed as pedophiles? From the popular to the political to the profound, each day brings new revelations that respected people, traditions, and institutions are not what we thought they were. Despite the shock that these disclosures produce, this state of affairs is anything but new. Facing the concrete task of living well when our best moral resources are not only contaminated but also potentially corrupting is an enduring feature of human experience. In this book, Karen V. Guth identifies 'tainted legacies' as a pressing contemporary moral problem and ethical challenge. Constructing a typology of responses to compromised thinkers, traditions, and institutions, she demonstrates the relevance of age-old debates in Christian theology for those who confront legacies tarnished by the traumas of slavery, racism, and sexual violence.