New Directions in Gender and Religion


Book Description

Brigid M. Sackey's book is a comprehensive analysis of gender relations in religion in Ghana, using gendered anthropological tools of rare insight and originality. The book chronicles the efforts of men and women who bring a repackaged and customized Christianity and health delivery to meet with the specific cultural needs. Sackey disabuses notions of the helplessness of women in Ghana specifically (and Africa in general) as it highlights women's initiatives and assertiveness as healers and leaders of the churches they have founded, in addition to their increased involvement and participation in gender discourses and social change. Sackey also addresses the question of HIV and the AIDS epidemic, detailing how the churches, through the specific leadership of women, are supporting a national campaign on the disease. Basing her research on an exhaustive library of oral history, ethnography, theory, and case studies, Sackey has brilliantly chronicled the relentless proliferation of and innovations in African Independent Churches, and their impact on the national health delivery system and its development.




New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights


Book Description

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, feminists are at a critical juncture to re-envision and re-engage in a politics of human rights. Interdisciplinary feminist conversations among scholar-activists can both challenge and enrich new directions in feminism and human rights. The scholarly and activist writings that comprise this collection advance both research and critical conversations about feminism and human rights by revealing the transformative potential of a feminist human rights praxis that embraces both critique and collective justice. The editors' method has been to move beyond a wholesale dismissal of human rights so that the book may begin new dialogues that envision transnational, gender and antiracist social justice approaches. This book features work that engages academic critiques of human rights frameworks yet goes further by exploring the potential of human rights activism ‘from below’. These groundbreaking chapters and conversations provide evidence of the persistent challenges and the attendant possibilities inherent in feminist human rights activism and theorizing – they offer this book, underscoring the creative displays of grassroots resistance by women globally and affirming transnational feminist solidarity. This book was published as a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.




Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse


Book Description

The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.




Gender and Identity: Key Themes and New Directions


Book Description

A core text for courses in gender studies, which uses identity as an entry point for examining gender construction.




The Glyph and the Gramophone


Book Description

D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1914, 'Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depths of my religious experience.' Although he had broken with the Congregationalist faith of his childhood by his early twenties, Lawrence remained throughout his writing life a passionately religious man. There have been studies in the last twenty years of certain aspects of Lawrence's religious writing, but we lack a survey of the history of his developing religious thought and of his expressions of that thought in his literary works. This book provides that survey, from 1915 to the end of Lawrence's life. Covering the war years, Lawrence's American works, his time in Australia and Mexico, and the works of the last years of his life, this book provides readers with a complete analysis, during this period, of Lawrence as a religious man, thinker and artist.




Media, Religion and Gender


Book Description

Media, Religion and Gender presents a selection of eminent current scholarship that explores the role gender plays when religion, media use and values in contemporary society interact. The book: surveys the development of research on media, religion and culture through the lens of key theoretical and methodological issues and debates within gender studies. includes case studies drawn from a variety of countries and contexts to illustrate the range of issues, theoretical perspectives and empirical material involved in current work outlines new areas and reflects on challenges for the future. Students of media, religion and gender at advanced level will find this a valuable resource, as will scholars and researchers working in this important and growing field.




Rivalrous Masculinities


Book Description

This book represents an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach to medieval masculinity, discussing gender studies, femininity, class, religion, and location.




New Directions for Holy Questions


Book Description

Rooted in the teachings of progressive Christianity for today’s kids and parents With accessible language, Bible stories, and connections to daily life, this book guides children and the adults who love them through the core teachings of Christianity. Kids have big questions about God and faith, and, while many of those questions don’t have one clear answer, Christians throughout the ages have given us helpful ways to think and talk about what we believe. Each chapter includes simple spiritual practices and questions for reflection, either in solitary reading or through conversation between children and caregivers or ministers. It is oriented towards anti-racism, gender equality, economic justice, care of the environment, affirmation of LGBTQ+ folks, trauma-informed practice, and global citizenship.




John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics


Book Description

John Cage was among the first wave of post-war American artists and intellectuals to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and it was an influence that led him to become profoundly engaged with our current ecological crisis. In John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger asks: what did Buddhism mean to Cage? And how did his understanding of Buddhist philosophy impact on his representation of nature? Following Cage's own creative innovations in the poem-essay form and his use of the ancient Chinese text, the I Ching to shape his music and writing, this book outlines a new critical language that reconfigures writing and silence. Interrogating Cage's 'green-Zen' in the light of contemporary psychoanalysis and cultural critique as well as his own later turn towards anarchist politics, John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics provides readers with a critically performative site for the Zen-inspired “nothing” which resides at the heart of Cage's poetics, and which so clearly intersects with his ecological writing.




Rethinking New Womanhood


Book Description

Covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, Rethinking New Womanhood effectively introduces a ‘new’ wave of gender research from South Asia that resonates with feminist debates around the world. The volume conceptualises ‘new womanhood’ as a complex, heterogeneous and intersectional identity. By deconstructing classification systems and highlighting women’s everyday ongoing negotiations with boundaries of social categories, the book reconfigures the concept of ‘new woman’ as a symbolic identity denoting ‘modern’ femininity at the intersection of gender, class, culture, sexuality and religion in South Asia. The collection maps new sites and expressions on women and gender studies around nationhood, women’s rights, transnational feminist solidarity, ‘new girlhoods ’, aesthetic and sexualised labour, respectability and ‘modernity’, LGBT discourses, domestic violence and ‘new’ feminisms. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, sociology, education, media and cultural studies, literature, anthropology, history, development studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.