Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise - Hardcover

King, Ursula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0941533530 ISBN 13: 9780941533539

Publisher: New Amsterdam Books, 1998

Synopsis

In the autumn of 1988 a group of Israeli women donned prayer shawls, took up the Torah, and gathered at the Wailing Wall to pray. The religious leaders of the State of Israel were appalled and proposed that the holy relics, so defiled, be burned. The Catholic Church has steadfastly refused to ordain women as priests. Examples of exclusionary practice abound in all the major religions. In the face of such attitudes and practices, how can women share fully in the spiritual wealth of which our religions are the expression?
To what extent are patriarchy, androcentrism, and sexism inherent in all religious institutions? How is the women's movement linked to the age-old quest for spirituality, the search for meaning, for ultimate values, for liberation and transcendence?
Ursula King believes that in recounting their own experience, women everywhere are expressing a new view of the world and a new spirituality for themselves and a response to the needs and opportunities of the age. In this book she explores the implicit and explicit demands of feminism, and discusses themes posed by women mystics, by goddess-worship in other cultures and in our own, by historical matriarchy, by feminist theology. Women and Spirituality is concerned with important issues of personal and social change, and the perspectives they open to non-violence, peace and the protection of the ecological matrix that supports our existence. It gives a wide-ranging account of women's relations with the world's religions and the spiritual dimension of human life.

About this title

About the Author:

Ursula King is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol, author of The Spirit of One Earth: Reflections on Teilhard de Chardin and Global Spirituality (Paragon House, 1989), and editor of Feminist Theology in the Third World (SPCK, forthcoming), and Turning Points in Religious Studies (T. & T. Clark, 1990), and Women in the World's Religions Past and Present (Paragon House, 1987).

Review:

Her examination of women's protests, of the emerging new consciousness, of women's history is highly accomplished. (The Book Reader)

About this edition

• Publisher: New Amsterdam Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0941533530
• ISBN 13: 9780941533539
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288