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.

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.

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 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)

Feminist theology is a significant movement within contemporary theology. The aim of this Companion is to give an outline of feminist theology through an analysis of its overall shape and its major themes, so that both its place in and its contributions to the present changing theological landscape may be discerned. The two sections of the volume are designed to provide a comprehensive and critical introduction to feminist theology which is authoritative and up-to-date. Written by some of the main figures in feminist theology, as well as by younger scholars who are considering their inheritance, it offers fresh insights into the nature of feminist theological work. The book as a whole is intended to present a challenge for future scholarship, since it critically engages with the assumptions of feminist theology, and seeks to open ways for women after feminism to enter into the vocation of theology.