Lisa Isherwood

God has assumed a significant role in the sex lives of believers. It is God who decrees which types of sexual expression are permitted, and which forbidden. Through the Church, a patriarchal sexual landscape has been enacted to control sexual bodies which exerts its influence even in our secular culture. The Good News of the Body is a wide-ranging anthology on feminist sexual theology. Noting that Jesus, while being declared divine, took human form, the volume questions what happens when the flesh, rather than the Word, is placed at the center of theological reflection. What happens when women's bodies form the incarnational starting point for sexual politics and theology? Contributors, including Rosemary Ruether, Mary Hunt, and Melissa Raphael, examine such topics as the possibility of a Roman Catholic approach to sexuality bringing together the three aspects of Christian love of eros, philia, and agape; Jewish sexual and mystical teaching; the de-sexing of the disabled; erotic celibacy; human sexuality and the concept of the goddess; and the sometimes surprisingly similar conclusions about contraception reached by feminists and popes.

Sexual Theology and Feminism

The Good News of the Body

Marko Zlomislić

Radical Orthodoxy, whose founding father is John Milbank, claims that God has been pushed to the margins in modernity and that a false and misleading neo-theology has taken hold that needs to be revisited and contested. It is this return to the premodern that often leads theologians to have reservations about Radical Orthodoxy when they might otherwise have some sympathy for many of its positions. Radical Orthodoxy, like most traditional theology, claims that the power of God is in all creation and that God sits everywhere for all to partake of. But there appears to be a failure to see that the church and theology do not set in place systems that live out this basic assumption. Liberation theology, while sharing much of the same assumption that God is everywhere and to be shared, at the same time engages in a critique of the structures that claim to facilitate this vision, and finds them wanting. From here, then, liberation theologians attempt to refigure our understanding of shared power in order to broaden the vision, while it may be argued that Radical Orthodoxy simply restates the assumption with little political critique of the issues. Perhaps this point explains why this book is titled The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy rather than Radical Error!

The Poverty of Radical Orthodoxy

Marcella Althaus-Reid

The Sexual Theologian is the first collection of essays on radical sexual theology written by a group of internationally renowned scholars in this area. For the first time Queer theory and theology is articulated around themes from systematic theology such as Incarnation, death, the concept of God, Mariology, together with discussions on sexuality and mysticism. The essays show a "how to do" a radical sexual theology together with original, bold and transgressive thinking which have taken feminist theologies to a new dimension of action and reflection.

Essays on Sex, God and Politics

The Sexual Theologian

Liberating Christ examines the various trajectories within the broad liberation framework for understanding the person and work of Jesus. Lisa Isherwood draws out the common themes found in liberation theologies, especially the use of class-race-gender analysis, as well as the distinctive understandings of Jesus within these theologies. In this wonderfully constructed introduction to liberation Christology, Isherwood surveys liberation theologies and the evolution of a Christology for our time -- a Christology that hopes to reclaim Christ from death by doctrinal fossilization.

Exploring the Christologies of Contemporary Liberation Movements

Liberating Christ

Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains takes as a starting point the hermeneutics of suspicion. The book illustrates the way in which texts and interpretations have been manipulated for the purpose of power and control. Through careful-counter readings it challenges the ways in which the female divine has been pushed back by relentless male interpretation and misrepresentation. The essays range across liberation theology and queer theory to sexual hospitality and the 'Song of Songs' as a challenge to hetero-patriarchy. The book provides an accessible resource for any student interested in the ways in which narrow readings of Scripture can become a power base for hierarchies of exclusion.

Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains

Elizabeth Stuart

This book sets out to examine the ambiguous relationship that Christianity has with the body. Incarnation is central to Christian belief but that doctrine has not encouraged a positive theology of the body. The authors explore why this has been so and examine ways in which a more body-positive theology can be developed using our Christian heritage. Starting from a feminist perspective they reclaim women's bodies from the embrace of patriarchy and in doing so clearly show how this reclamation challenges many systems of oppression. This work illustrates that the personal is political, even in theology!

Introducing Body Theology

Nur Masalha

This collection of essays concerns the development of contextualized theologies of liberation in Palestine and the indigenous Palestinian people's struggle for justice and liberation. The work is innovative because of its inclusion of indigenous perspectives within its remit and the introduction of new concepts such as civil liberation theology. The collection offers other ways to look at biblical discourses and their impact on the ongoing conflict, ways to live peace, ways to be ethical when visiting these conflicted lands, understandings of resource ethics, and even a new way to understand how we approach our understanding of liberation theology. Contributors include well-known scholars from Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Palestinian-Israeli, Indian, American, and British contexts. This work goes beyond standard academic collections. It is aimed not only at scholars and students but also at peace activists and policymakers. It should be of use not only in academic courses but also for practitioners of conflict resolution, peace and reconciliation.

Indigenous, Contextual, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Theologies of Liberation in Palestine-Israel

Mark D. Jordan

Marcella Althaus-Reid was one of the most fascinating and controversial theologians of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her strong personality and her iconoclastic work inspired a whole generation of theologians in the UK and worldwide. Marcella's creative life was cut short by her death from cancer in 2009. Yet she lives on, not least in those who have been inspired by her work and continue to engage with it. "Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots" draws together a number of world-class scholars and others who engage with the main themes of Marcella's work and show how the critical and controversial conversations which Marcella has begun can and do continue. It is therefore far more than a Festschrift, but a celebration of an intellectual life Marcella-style.

Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid

Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots

This volume critically engages with the problems traditional Christology raises for feminist theology. It also explores the creative engagements of feminist theologians with the person of Jesus.

Introducing Feminist Christologies

We are living in a food and body image obsessed culture. We are encouraged to over-consume by the marketing and media that surround us and then berated by those same forces for doing so. At the same time, we are bombarded with images of unnaturally thin celebrities who go to enormous lengths to retain an unrealistic body image, either by extremes of dieting or through plastic surgery or both. The spiritual realm is not immune from these pressures, as can be seen in the flourishing of biblically and faith based weight loss programs that encourage women to lose weight physically and gain spiritually. Isherwood examines this environment in light of Christian tradition, which has often had a difficult relationship with sexuality and embodiment and which has promoted ideals of restraint and asceticism. She argues that part of the reason for our current obsession and bizarre treatment of issues around weight, size and looks is that secular society has unknowingly absorbed many of its negative attitudes towards the body from its Christian heritage. Isherwood argues powerfully that there are resources within Christianity that can free us from this thinking, and lead us towards a more holistic, incarnational view of what it is to be human. The Fat Jesus provides a fascinating study of the complex ways that food, women and religion interconnect, and proposes a theology of embrace and expansion emphasizing the fullness of our incarnation.

Christianity and Body Image

The Fat Jesus

Rosemary Radford Ruether

Violence remains endemic in today's society. Religious morality and social prejudice can lead to many acts of violence going unnoticed. 'Weep Not for Your Children' presents a selection of essays that examine the ways in which religion and violence interconnect. The presence of violence in the origins of cultural and religious norms is examined. The essays cover a wide range of examples of violence: from the Holocaust to domestic violence and from the violence created by economic systems to that created by the construction of gender itself. 'Weep Not for Your Children' challenges and provokes the reader to think beyond traditional associations of good and evil.

Essays on Religion and Violence

Weep Not for Your Children

Dirk von der Horst

Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality provides a much-needed overview of the state of scholarship on Christian theological reflection on sexuality and sexual theology. Critically, it also intervenes in the cultural debate over sexuality by privileging feminist, queer, and other counter-normative perspectives. Comprising twenty-three chapters by a team of international contributors this volume is divided into four parts: • Normativity and transgression • Bodies • Economies and violence • Divinity. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including consideration of the complexities of Christian theology in regard to contemporary sexuality debates. Contemporary Theological Approaches to Sexuality is essential reading for students and researchers in the field of religion, sexuality, and Christianity.

Lisa Isherwood

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