Feminist Theology From The Third World

This major new collection of readings demonstrates the range and vitality of feminist theology and its increasing influence on Christian women and men throughout the world. Here are thirty-eight key texts, representing the voices of women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as those working among minorities in places such as Israel, the US, and the Pacific. The readings are grouped under five headings: --Doing Theology from Third World Women's Perspective --Women's Oppression and Cries of Pain --The Bible as a Source of Empowerment for Women --Challenging Traditional Theological Thinking --A Newly Emerging Spirituality All texts are placed in context by brief introductory comments, while the main introduction to the whole book provides a helpful overview of the major issues and developments in Christian-feminist thinking throughout the Third World and beyond. Among the contributors are Chung Hyun Kyung (Korea), Ivone Gebara (Brazil), Kwok Pui-lan (Hong Kong), Mercy Amba Oduyoye (Ghana), Delores S. Williams (USA).

In 1988 Virginia Fabella from the Philippines and Mercy Amba Oduyoye from Ghana coedited With Passion and Compassion: Third world Women Doing Theology, based on the work of the Women's Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). The book has been widely used as an important resource for understanding women's liberation theologies, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America emerging out of women's struggles for justice in church and society. More than twenty years have passed and it is time to bring out a new collection of essays to signal newer developments and to include emerging voices. Divided into four partsContext and Theology; Scripture; Christology; and Body, Sexuality, and Spiritualitythese carefully selected essays paint a vivid picture of theological developments among indigenous women and other women living in the global South who face poverty, violence, and war and yet find abundant hope through their faith.

An outstanding collection of original essays, most published here for the first time, With Passion and Compassion provides the outlines of the common struggle of Third World women to forge their own, liberative theology. Protestant and Catholic, these women from Asia, Africa, and Latin America explore the question of what it means to be a Christian, and a woman, in the Third World. The contributors to With Passion and Compassion address traditional theological topics: christology, spirituality, the Bible. But they do so from the perspective that comes out of a struggle to overcome social and economic oppression. Their reflections constitute a powerful statement of faith as well as a challenge to existing structures and thinking, political and patriarchal.

Ecofeminists in the North must listen carefully to women in the South since common problems can only be solved by understanding cultural and historical differences. When women of the South reflect on ecological themes, these questions are rooted in life and death matters, not in theory, nor statistics. As Ruether writes, "Deforestation means women walking twice as far each day to gather wood ....

This book represents a major contribution toward the development of a global feminist theology. The personal histories and experiences of women of African, Asian, Anglo-American, and Latin-American heritage recounted here make it possible to analyze the social and historical contexts of their Christian faith. Their insights into the lives of those who have been oppressed or excluded, in the Third World or in the United States, clear the way for understanding the partnership of men and women everywhere.

This book engages with the critical tools of Edward Said (1935-2003) and traces the voyage of various postcolonial feminist theologians. Along four intersecting lines, postcolonial feminist theology unfolds as addressing cultural othering, religious othering, gendered othering, and sexual othering. In critical solidarity with those constructed as other postcolonial feminist theology, the book challenges the norms of Western theology. (Series: ContactZone. Explorations in Intercultural Theology - Vol. 16)

Controversies in Feminist Theologies is a clear and accessible analysis of the current controversies within feminist theologies. It uses many of the themes of systematic theology to examine whether feminist theology has a future or whether its discourse and praxis has become bankrupt. The authors expand this question through an examination of whether the whole project of systematic theology has become outmoded. The book is the first to expose the myth of homogeneity and some of the common stereotypes and myths surrounding Feminist Theologies, from a methodological and thematic perspective. It addresses current stereotypes built around North Atlantic and Third World feminist theology, including issues concerning Mariology, the use of the Bible and the centrality of women's experiences in feminist praxis, while highlighting the richness of different and at times opposite positions in the debates of theology, gender and sexuality.